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Barry's life
PART 1: The weekend of wintry lights (16)

PART 1: The weekend of wintry lights (16)

2020

Saturday

In the middle of the cataclysm that was her apartment, her wrecked book shelves, her crumbled dining room table, the ponds of blood and other suspicious things in which pieces of glass and broken pots bathed, it occurred to Eugenie that modern places of practiced medicine, such as the clinic where she had interned more than fifteen years before, employed teams. Teams versus individuals. Saving a person’s life, providing urgent attention, putting the foundation steps to a healing stairway, all those tasks were titanic for one person alone, one task after the other with no option of taking a break. She had never known exhaustion before that day, before Barry’s thunderous reappearance in her life.

She couldn’t feel her shoulders, she couldn’t feel her back, her neck. The tension was too great and some hordes of centipedes had started marching ferociously across the top of her body after her return from her school nursery mission but now, the imaginary insects had gone home and she simply had shattered into pieces and nothingness. She knew that the next step, emerging out of that numbness, she would welcome all sorts of torticoli and tumbago. She was too old for this shit.

She glanced at Barry who was, at this moment, unconscious on her floor, his arms and legs stretched nicely and looking like he had just been gently deposited there, his face peaceful. It was possible indeed that sleep rebooted him, because once he faded out, he looked as if he was taking a very pleasant nap. She had cut through the tee-shirt he was wearing under his superhero suit and his skin was covered with blood, a small puddle had formed in the hole where his clavicles met under his chin, trembling with his breath. Something about this vision was heart-wrenching. She felt the need to wash him, get rid of this sticky human juice, clean him and put all the gore dimension of that episode behind them, but she knew she was barely getting started.

She granted herself the time to make a cup of double shot espresso, even though she knew she would have to sanitize herself entirely again after that, but the survival of her endeavor depended strongly on her waking state. Sipping quickly through the burning beverage, she raised the pincers in front of her eyes and observed at the little piece of metal she had fished out from Barry. It was vaguely flattened at the front, from the impact, and it had a dull shape, almost cute. She shuddered, horrified at how a tiny thing like this could create such damage in a person, and she didn’t think further: opening her trash bin with her foot, she threw the bullet and the pincers altogether into it. Slammed it shut.

She went on and ate the last three chicken nuggets from the plate she had abandoned a few hours earlier when Barry had irrupted on her balcony, but she didn’t sit on the couch. She saw that her salvation, and Barry’s, would come from not allowing herself any comfort, any sheltered moment of pause, not any closing of eyes or shutting away the world. If she sat down, she wouldn’t be able to get back up.

She would spring solely from deep-rooted and drilled-over and uninterrupted action, permission to drink and feed for the only purpose of fueling. Eugenie had no choice. Plus, what would a recreation, a collation, a snooze, do to her psyche? Possibly bring her back to a place of forgetting what had just happened to her, what horrors she had agreed to participate in and then, the truth would hit again, with unspeakable cruelty and she would have to begin from scratch again, go through the denial and the acceptance and find her arduous way back into action.

She massaged her forehead while she was chewing on the food. Now that her table was no more, she had to think. It was the best time to move Barry out of the living room and into somewhere more hidden. Earth still existed around this ordeal she was trying to work through, and you never knew when someone was going to show up. True, she hadn't made any plans and she doubted some surprise party would gather at her door, but the building’s handyman on Saturday morning was possible? Someone sent by the landlady to check the parameters of her heater, for instance? A coldness went down her spine, chills the size of lemons. As her hands were now dirty with some nugget breading and she had uncovered her mouth to sip on her coffee, she could take care of some heavy weight dirty work now and clean herself up later.

What had he said about his power? Something seemed to regenerate him, while he was abandoned in slumber, he had briefly mentioned, or at least recharge his batteries. Fascinating. Her own batteries were now resurrected too from ingesting the magic coffee potion, so she nodded to herself and got to moving. She ran back to her bedroom and grabbed her cat, planting some little kisses on the top of his sleepy head, and she shoved him delicately inside his carry-on crate, the one she used when she was deep cleaning her house or to go to the cat doctor. She added some treats, a bowl of wet tuna food and some water, his favorite blanket, and she placed the box on the sofa next to the window. Terence was deaf but he had piercing eyes and was particularly fond of night watching.

After starting the water kettle, she forgot the beverage half empty –or full— on top of the commode of the entrance, she rushed to the large drawers that rectangled around her bed frame and gutted them, as she was pretty sure the item she was searching had been purchased and never used, thus stored at the very bottom. Right, she pulled on the malleable material. It was a gigantic laminated picnic table cloth, or grass-cloth, as some people called it. She hovered it under her nose, smelled plastic, then she assaulted her bed, stripped the entire thing and shoved the sheets and pillowcases into the laundry basket. There would be a monster laundry in her near future, that was for sure. Completely boosted by the return of the caffeine in her veins, Eugenie became unstoppable.

Stretching her neck and her arms in a way that was going to give her soreness for the next month –she should have gone to the gym, she knew it, she should have gone with Sophie when she was going out with that coach guy—, she extended the plastic cover as main bedding, dove inside a comforter wrap and wiggled the comforter inside, a big fluffy blanket, then attributed some new pillowcases. Then dropped the blanket on the floor in a neat pile. She mopped: that was the easy part. A nauseating feeling of anxiety crept back into her in this transition phase. Now that she had been busy with some ordinary house chores, she dreaded returning to the living room where Barry was sleeping. Every time they parted ways in their new unusual dynamics, she feared she’d find him again and dead. Trespassed. She proceeded back to the main area carefully.

She checked from the kitchen door that his chest was still rising and falling and there, she encountered a memory about that anecdote from Ram Dass discussing meditation: ‘it was just a rising feeling and a falling feeling, my breathing, for hours, and I told my guru. He asked me if anything happened during that time, and I said I heard a bird at the very beginning. Then my guru wished to know if I heard that bird during a falling or a rising, and that was his assignment for the day’ Some people were definitely more skilled at making a grand living than she was, she thought bitterly. She tried so hard to be a teacher and, she saw, depressed, she tried so hard to get rid of Barry the teacher way, by motivating him to change options, and now, out of all the things she had done, all that mattered to him was that she had been a nurse.

The kettle was whistling, so she poured all its contents into a salad bowl and dried the edges with a rough sponge. Slowly, she knelt next to Barry with the water. She sighed, feeling her heart tighten in her chest. She was still not entirely able to seize the measure of what he had been through, not just today but during the past years. How long had the Bolt been known to be part of the Team? A while, for sure. Perhaps it had originated for him while he was still in high school, and she shivered at the thought. The two radiators cranked at the maximum around Barry had quite a difficult time warming the place up, and his own skin was still covered with jimjams.

She couldn’t deal with all that blood anymore so she set out to clean him, but she froze, her sponge suspended above his chest and abdomen. The silence gripped her at the throat and shoulders, she went into apnea. On a rising. “I’m sorry, Barry” she whispered on a falling, “I’m doing all I can, I promise” then her cat meowed from the couch, she lifted her head to face him, on a rising, “I can’t keep Barry all bloody and messy like that” she begged him, “it’s a matter of dignity, don’t you think?” she asked him. Terence stared back at her with reproach, but she couldn’t let him out, not with all the broken pieces of ceramic and glass on the floor.

She lifted Barry’s arm and scrubbed it with the sponge and the hot water, dried it. She thought about her own rising and falling and a cogitative state, became aware of her windows. Who in their right mind would be cleaning what looked like a dead body on a Friday night, in the middle of a destroyed apartment with the lights on while the windows were wide open to the outside eye? Of course, she lived in a terrible neighborhood where murder potentially wasn’t such a big deal, but still! She jumped at the idea and apologized to Terence, as she lowered the metallic shutters opening on the boulevard. She placed the laptop she had left on the coffee table in front of the cat’s crate and started a wildlife documentary, “come on sweetie pie, you can’t spy on the street tonight, watch this instead, you know, you will love it, it has lots of birds in it”

Out of all the documentaries she had watched or shown to her class, her favorite ones were the ones beautifully narrated by Sir David Attenborough. She let her chest rise and fall in the stillness, closing her eyes at his opening statement, ‘If we don’t teach our children to appreciate Ea-hearth’ he said, ‘they won’t see the importance of it, they won’t want to protect it’ Then he proceeded to explain, in an absurdly soothing manner, how perilous the gnus crossing of the river during their migration was due to the large number of starving alligators swimming near the surface.

‘A mighty crowd greeted by an audience of empty stomachs and mouths equipped with some pretty sharp teeth’ he states. She began to speak out loud too, “why do nature documentaries always show that damn scene of the gnus crossing the river” she asked Barry, rinsed the front of his chest, rubbed the caked blood under his chin vigorously, hoping that he would wake up and be in agreement with this. He remained asleep, in a way, peacefully asleep, as if the dialogue between Eugenie and Attenborough was some kind of slam nursery rhyme, “and then, you’ve got the mama cheetah and her hungry cubs” she sighed, “hey, we get it, predators have to feed too”

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“It cannot be worse than the scene of the orcas playing with a seal before eating it, Barry, I’ve seen that on the big screen at the cinema” she described to him, back and forth between the living room and the bathroom, busy with her sanitizer, disinfecting her fingers, washing her face, putting back her gloves, “it was Our Blue Planet, and let me tell you, when you see that hunt on Imax, you—” she glanced down at him, making sure he was still out, “I mean you’re never the same afterwards” Why the fuck did I go see Our Blue Planet on Imax and with whom? She thought, perturbed, amnesic. She dug inside the bag from school, produced her spool of threads, squinted at it through the needle, then leaned over him again, “I mean, animals can be sadistic too” she said, realized she was herself armed with some pretty sharp tools on top of Barry, cleared her throat nervously.

“I think in the first episode of this show” she was now talking over Attenborough, as she had played the series many times, “the best part is the apes, oh my god” she was also talking over the disgusting sound that scratching off some dead or gangrenous skin around a bullet wound was making with a dull-ish scalpel, “they look so much like us, Barry, you know, it’s freaky. Especially Bonobos, they are from the Congo” Which Congo? The voice asked her. She couldn’t remember which Congo. She was a Geography teacher and she couldn’t remember if the animals came from the Democratic Republic of Congo or from Congo Brazzaville.

Such a teacher you are, she heard, raising the thread high in the air to unroll the spool and prepare a large enough length, he’s going to die from boredom if not from getting gunned down, and the feeling was quite familiar from the one they had shared between the school walls, so she did her best to chase the thought away, did her best to focus on some pretty precise stitching.

On the laptop, a small but fiery group of elephants charged and trumpeted and the sound startled her. She jumped on her butt and went too far with the needle, “oh SHIT oh my god, oh m—” she pulled on the string and went sideways, “SHIT” there was nothing she could do except making things worse. “I’m sorry Barry” Eugenie whimpered, “the elephants… the fucking elephants” She hurried to finish this task, attempted to make up for her terrible job by cutting a very straight square of band-aid, soaked it with sterilizing spray and rolled him in some thick bandages. She was sweating profusely but she completed her job before a drop of perspiration detached from the tip of her nose beyond the mask. All good. She wiped it, replaced the mask with a drier one.

In the outside pockets of her bag she found the bottle of penicillin she had stolen from the infirmary. She made sure she paused the documentary when she injected him with it, and then closed up the holes on his arm, impressed by neatness of the entry and exit it had suffered. “Jesus” she trembled, “so scary” Who were those robots Barry had said had shot him? They were not from Russia, he had said, they were from outer worlds. She must have not understood well, she shook her head, lifted his arm to wash it clean with the water.

Much better, she admired her work. Such a nurse you are, except for this small butchery on Barry’s stomach. Eugenie listened to the end of the episode in order to collect herself, and it was when the story was closing with the beautiful moment a young female turtle reached her breeding grounds for the first time after being at sea for three years. How would an animal that was no fish, Eugenie thought, an organism who needed the air of Earth to breathe, be drawn to the water this way? They could hold their breaths in the water, and they slept in the water, but they always had to go back to the surface to stay alive. Goosebumps.

Goosebumps cause what? ‘Cause the three year-old turtle, now one meter of length, traveled and dodged shark’s traps on the way.

Goosebumps cause? ‘Cause when stars died in space, they produced the same minerals as her shell, her safe refuge, in which she would retreat in the absence of hiding spot between sea rocks or coral, justifying why she returned to breeding grounds –iron, out of all metals—once her adult age reached, and knew exactly where those grounds were located. Extinguished stardust powered turtles, when nuclear fusions creating heavier galaxies couldn’t function anymore and relegated themselves to simple iron dictating molecular paths into a living animal. Doomed star and ringing ear straightened Eugenie’s back.

She dried him with her biggest bathroom towel, added it to the laundry pile which was now sticking out of the basket, so she looked for an equally enormous garbage bag to create a new pile, was surprised to find her leftover coffee from earlier on top of her corridor shelves, “here you are! I was already feeling drowsy again” Terence had fallen asleep in front of the second episode of the series, this one taking place in the Arctic. Everyone was sleeping, except for her. ‘Narwhals use their front horns to dig through the ice during the cold season, and it also serves as a weapon’ Attenborough continued.

“You remember when Marge said narwhals were unicorns” she asked Barry “by the way, now would be a good time to wake up” She stayed motionless at his side, breathing deeply through her facemask, wrinkling the clothes she had brought between her fingers. She couldn’t just leave him like this, looking like he had been found in a bin, his suit pants smelling of dried blood and dirty water from the sewers. “I’m sorry Barry, I will be so quick, just like you are, I mean, like you are normally” Eugenie saw that she wasn’t able to enjoy pondering things anymore, in this new order of things, “just like the Bolt” she pulled strongly at the bottom of his trousers and slid them away, pretended she didn’t notice that he was wearing some ridiculous Iron Man shorts underneath and, without wasting any second, wriggled him inside very large sweatpants that she had purchased the wrong size for herself ages ago and kept for days when she felt like an old fat potato.

“See?” she sat up, out of breath, dizzy, completely traumatized, “splendid! So clean” The walls were dancing around her, spinning.

‘Polar bea-ears’ Attenborough was vibing into the story with his deep and quavering voice, ‘do not hibernate, on the contrary, they thrive in the wintertime’ Eugenie finished her coffee, her eyes sliding back and forth from the sweatshirt on her lap to Barry in the middle of the broken table pieces. She couldn’t see a way to dress him with it so she switched gears, paced rapidly to the bedroom again, spread the cardigan open on the bed, and decided that it was time to move Barry before anything else. For good, then, she’d be able to tidy all the destruction from the main space of her home, release her cat and.. she wondered, what next? The vertigo possessed her head once more. She was starting to slow down again, to fall prey to some thinking about the future, some anxiety, some disturbing unknowns, so she pressed the buttons on her coffee machine, added two sugar cubes at the bottom of her mug, watched the smoke rise.

The beginning of her plan was not complicated: Barry was lying on top of one table cloth, the one that had been sitting on her table before it collapsed, and she desired to move him to another table cloth, this time, the plasticky one she had extended over her bed. She used her feet to clear the debris around the scene and made her first attempt, grabbed the fabric with both hands and pulled as strongly as she could. It was sliding, alright! ‘Feeding frenzy ensues at the arrival of the sardines’ she heard from the documentary, oh my god, already episode three, ‘joined by sharks, dolphins, cormorant and even one journeying beluga, it barely depletes their population, and some think that the voyage doesn’t include an objective pertinent to the survival of the sardines, only from an ancient time where it might have been. Solely remains, nowadays, the instinct to take the trip and provide nourishment, incidentally, to all the marine creatures on the path’

“What a great narrator he is” Eugenie commented to Barry while on their own journey through the narrow entrance corridor. She took a small break halfway there, sweating heavily, hyperventilating. There was a feeling floating inside her chest that, once Barry was there, in the bedroom that had been hers until yesterday, there would truly be no turning back. She was hiding him in the depths of her flat, in the most profound corner of her life. “People loved Morgan Freeman in the penguin movie, and I agree, don’t get me wrong” she bent forward and continued her tugging and pulling, “but Attenborough is next level, I think”

Just under her head as she was inserting him through the bedroom door, Barry opened his yes, “Attenwhat?” he asked, and she lost her grip as well as her footing. Eugenie gasped and fell backwards, this time against the stool on which was sitting her old vinyl player, which got knocked over too in a great cacophonous crash.

“BARRY” she moaned and groaned, fed up with all the crashing and breaking, “you’re…” you’re a monster, “awake, NO, don’t move, I just patched you up PLEASE—”

“I’m sorryy” he squealed, horrified, “I’m going to—” he rose on his elbows, bit his lips as something filled up his cheeks.

“NO nonono WAIT”

“I’m going to be sick” she saw him sit up, jerked upwards by the nausea, a flower of blood opening on his stomach under the rolls of bandages.

“Nooo I just d WAIT NOT ON THE PANTS” she pounced on top of him and took hold of his shoulders, spun him on his butt before he expelled all the vomit in his mouth. Miraculously, she was successful, as the liquidy chunky mix missed his new trousers and spread around the broken morsels of her music player. “Phew” she exhaled heavily, holding him through the shakes that followed “that was close”

“Wh… what pants” he spat out one last bubble, his breath whistling like a tired bagpipe at an Irish concert.

“It’s not important, here, take this” she handed him the rag from her pocket, kept him sitting up with his back against her knees, “you’re feeling better?”

“I’m… feeling kinda weird”

“Kinda weird” she repeated and clicked her tongue

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry” he sniffled loudly “I keep making so much mess”

“Hey, that’s okay, now, look, you’re sitting up, that’s good”

“I can’t hold that position much l--”

“Cause I want to put you on this bed, you see it?”

“I’m… cold” he shivered.

“Uuuugh Barry you have so many needs— HERE” Eugenie launched herself towards the bed while preserving her hold of Barry, managed to get her foot into some sticky vomit on the floor, “hhmf” she grunted “look, this sweatshirt, it’s for you, you can put it on”

He finally folded forward and freed her from his weight, landed his hand in the vomit too, hooked his other hand on his stomach, “just give me a min… minute”

“One thing at a time” she said encouragingly, such a teacher you are, “here, see the sleeve, put your hand there” she guided him from behind him as if she was a marionettist, trying to ignore the puddle of puke in which they were operating “and now the other hand”

“It huurts, ohmygod it hu—”

“One thing at a time” she implored him “come on, you gotta help me help you” That was such a teacher thing to say.

“That’s such a teacher thing to say”

“Shut up Barry” she chuckled, as the desire to strangle him was restored from the years passed, intact, inside her heart, “ready? I’m going to lift you, and you’re going to push on your feet, then your legs, it’ll be quick”

He raised his head to plunge his eyes into hers as her face was hanging on top of him, her hands under his arms, “did you.. change my clothes?”