Chapter 2 - Apocalypse 2012
Coincidence Speaks
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Welcome to Chapter 2 of Coincidence Speaks! To start at the beginning, please head this way.
We kick off Chapter 2 in the immediate aftermath of Paul’s unfortunate ankle implosion.
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Chapter 2
Apocalypse 2012
After gritting through a nerve-wracking boardroom meeting that afternoon, plastering the most professional expression on his face he could muster, Paul finally made it home, crumpling into the welcoming arms of his favorite Man Chair recliner. No amount of golden brown single malt seemed to be enough to quell the throbbing in his foot.
Clara couldn’t help herself, and gave him one of her trademark “Now what have you managed to do to yourself?” looks. Paul grimaced, imagining all wives kept similar looks on reserve for their husbands for such occasions.
Days passed. The ankle was fat and swollen and stubborn and black and blue. It didn’t want to heal.
But Paul was stubborn too. Sixteen years of public and college education plus a decade in the corporate world had taught him that personal willpower and focused effort were always the best answers to getting the results he wanted. So he doubled down, set his jaw, and decided to will his right foot back into proper function.
A lover of all things sport since early childhood, Paul had been through plenty of sprained ankles before. The gold standard for recovery was always rest, ice, compression, and elevation (R.I.C.E. for short). Precautionary X-rays showed no clear fracture, so on he went with the tried and true method.
This time felt different though, as much as he fought to convince himself otherwise. This time the more effort he put into rehabilitating his foot, the more it pushed back.
After five full days of meticulous R.I.C.E., Paul decided he felt good enough to forge his way back to the Gold’s Gym for a modified workout. He made it through the parking lot just fine, pushing through the door filled with his usual determination. But the moment he stepped through the threshold, his ankle protested so sharply it stole the breath from his lungs. His leg buckled awkwardly, and he stumbled forward the rest of the way to the check-in counter.
He didn’t even make it ten minutes into his workout before he had to drag himself back to his car, hot tears threatening to squeeze out of the corners of his eyes. One made it all the way through his defenses, dropping onto the leather seat below with a muted thip.
Demoralized by this resounding defeat at the gym, Paul took more time to elevate his foot and keep as much weight off of it as possible. After a few additional days of rest, the ankle felt much better. Still tender and a little puffy, but perfectly okay to walk on.
Elated, Paul moved about his day at the office as normal, walking free of pain once again, relieved to be back on track. But the next morning when he swung his legs out of bed and onto the floor, the ankle was so stiff and swollen that he could hardly stand.
Weeks turned into months, and the ankle was maddeningly deceptive. A string of good days would give Paul hope, but they were invariably followed by a streak of bad ones where it was nearly impossible to walk at all. The bad days gradually overtook the good ones, a subtle creeping normality happening underfoot despite all of his best efforts.
Paul hobbled onto the bathroom scale after work one evening, aghast to see he’d added over twenty pounds to his formerly muscular frame. His outlook darkened at his misfortune, and Clara was bearing the brunt of his bitterness.
“Paul, can you help me for a minute?” Clara’s voice curled into the bathroom from somewhere in the kitchen area. He stared down at the scale, pretending not to hear.
Footsteps came padding towards him and she poked her head into the bathroom. “Hey, there you are. I’m about to feed Noel; do you mind unloading the dishwasher when you have a minute?”
He hopped a couple times and winced, making it to the bathroom counter. “A minute? It’ll take like fifteen hopping back and forth on one fricking leg. Does it look like I’m in much of a position to unload dishes?”
“Knock it off, Poppy,” she admonished, having recently taken to referring to him as her often confused, always grumpy grandfather. “Fine, forget I asked.”
He scowled through a clenched jaw, unable to begrudge her the attempt in trying to find humor in an otherwise humorless situation, but he hated the nickname. Clara’s moniker cut to the bone—he did feel like an old man now, powerless as his own body deteriorated against his will. Over the past few months, his vitality had been slowly siphoned away, an insidious slow leak in a tire he couldn’t find and couldn’t patch.
Paul hardly recognized the sullen eyes glaring out of the distorted image in the bathroom mirror. He was shocked by how quickly all the hard-earned muscle and strength he’d so painstakingly cultivated over more than a decade of working out had disappeared into thin air. His vaunted physical fitness—a visible confirmation of egoic supremacy over other “lesser” male physical specimens—had been ripped away from him in one random accident, exposed for the brittle illusion it always was.
“No wonder Poppy’s so damn grumpy,” he muttered to himself as Clara turned her back and walked away. Her heavy sigh didn’t quite reach his ears.
Paul’s snapping irritability was even less tolerable relative to a growing incapacity to help Clara around the house. Unable to perform his standard husbandly duties like mowing the lawn, taking out the trash, and generally serving as one-man moving crew for any and all heavy objects, he felt more and more worthless.
They were both losing patience not only in the situation, but for one another.
Perhaps the comparison to her grumbling grandfather was the last straw. In any case, Paul Endrum finally gave up trying to fix things on his own. He could no longer fly. He could no longer jump. He could no longer walk.
He came to the stark realization that he was no longer even fit to watch his own two-year-old daughter anymore.
Something had to be done.
Fortunately the next step was obvious. Why else would so much of his hard-earned paycheck go towards expensive health insurance if not for this very situation?
After careful research alongside Clara, who was well connected with the local medical community by virtue of her nursing career, Paul finally visited a well-reviewed, Clara-approved orthopedic physician. He was highly impressed by the physician’s real-world experience and credentials. And the multiple degrees and certifications hanging proudly on his office wall provided plenty of visual reassurance.
Another X-ray followed by an MRI revealed a disheartening sight—there was now a gaping hole in the cartilage and bone of his right ankle.
The orthopedic physician seemed strangely excited about it though. “Cartilage doesn’t heal,” he pronounced, “that’s why you’ve had such a hard time recovering from this on your own.”
He was all the more enthusiastic about recommending something he called “microfracture surgery.”
“Microfracture,” he explained to Paul, “is a cutting-edge surgical procedure where bone marrow is punctured to stimulate blood flow, which hardens over twelve weeks or so and forms a blood clot that will help plug the hole in your ankle. A couple weeks in a cast, then ten weeks non-weight-bearing, and a couple more months of physical therapy after that and you should be upright and mobile again!”
“Ugh—this is really going to suck,” Paul thought, not saying anything aloud.
Reading the pained expression painting Paul’s face, he quickly added, “I do these procedures all the time, and most patients experience positive outcomes. You’re young and healthy; you’ll be in good shape.”
Another six months relegated to couches and chairs in a non-weightbearing boot didn’t sound pleasant, but Paul was willing to try anything at this point. Just being able to walk again would be a “positive outcome,” as far as he was concerned.
One month later, Paul gingerly picked his way towards the outpatient facility for his scheduled surgery, leaning on Clara and a single bing-bing for support. Bing-bings were Noel’s brilliant name for the metal crutches he now used to help toddle his own way around the house. Every move he’d made for the past several months was punctuated by a metallic bing.
“I’m more machine now than man,” he’d say to her, completely undeterred in quoting Star Wars to a two-and-a-half year old. Never having been through any kind of surgery before, Paul was nervous, but more than ready to get it over with and live independently of bing-bings once again.
Once they were all checked in, the anesthesiologist began their work in earnest, poking around the nerves behind his right knee for an unsettlingly long time before finally settling on a spot that would numb his right leg for the next twenty four hours. Soon after that, Paul’s grip on reality began to slip from the strong sedatives of general anesthesia. But on the plus side, he felt lighthearted and pain free for the first time in months.
Paul was suddenly loving life, cracking drug-infused Dad jokes to Clara and the medical staff without a care in the world. He fought hard to stay awake, to hang on to that welcome feeling of lightness that had been missing from his life for so long.
Drooping eyelids grew heavier by the second… he strained with all his might to keep them open… to hang onto that feeling of levity for as long as he could…
He must have blinked.
When his eyes opened back up again, they were squinting up into a bright vortex of harsh light.
“What… Where am I?”
Then he noticed he was strapped down on some kind of gurney, totally immobilized. Only his eyes had full freedom to move; the rest of his body was locked down, paralyzed.
He came all the way into consciousness then, and it began to dawn on him just where he was, and what was happening. Paul panicked.
Something was very wrong.
The atmosphere in the operating room felt horribly, inescapably off. It was like that ancient subconscious undercurrent, that “splinter in his mind,” had been amplified a thousandfold.
Paul looked around, confused.
Instead of supporting medical equipment, his body was attached to gleaming, soul-sucking machines, draining his life force in measured gulps. The orthopedic surgeon and his support team had somehow transformed into sadistic demonic figures, scurrying about the room, gleeful and gloating at his predicament. Terror gripped his throat and a sickening feeling roiled in his gut.
A looming shadow blocked the light above as the surgeon’s head cut into his field of vision, a macabre solar eclipse. Beads of sweat dripped down off his grimacing face, a cold focused look festering in his eyes through gruesome glass monocles while he grappled with Paul’s afflicted leg.
Everything seemed so very real.
“I have to get out of here!” Paul’s heart beat so fast he feared it might burst out of his chest.
And that’s exactly what it did.
The crushing terror evaporated all at once, before he knew what was happening, Paul found himself floating at the top of the ceiling, looking down upon the entire scene with a panoramic bird’s eye view. He could see the white gurney with a gleaming metal portal affixed to each side of his ankle, like a cage. He could see the tops of everyone’s heads, the surgical scrubs, even his own motionless body below…
“Wait a second—I’m flying!” he realized with a start, looking down at his physical form in surprise. Then he felt the orthopedic surgeon wrestling with his leg again, snapping him downwards like a genie into a bottle, and he fell back into fathomless oblivion.
When Paul awoke he dismissed his brief adventure floating up on the ceiling of the operating room as a wild hallucination. Both it and the preceding nightmarish scene were immediately forgotten.
Back home, he was over the moon excited about a new beginning. He stared at his big toe peeking out at him from the hard cast, wondering when the numbness of the anesthetic block would wear off. With lots of focus and determination, the toe finally wiggled back at him, as if to say hello.
Now the road to real recovery would start. Six months of grueling rehab and learning to walk again couldn’t be all that bad. Not compared to what he’d already been through. Pins and needles engulfed his foot as the last edges of anesthesia finally wore off, and he allowed himself a smile as feeling began to return.
That was the moment all hell broke loose.
End Chapter 2
Chapter 3 will post next Friday, February 9th. Thank you for being here in live interactive real time! Comments and feedback are always welcome.
In gratitude,
E.T. Allen
This is brilliant. Others will be able to provide feedback on the writing, but from a story perspective, this leaves me with so many questions I want the answers to. The writing has pulled me all the way in. You’ve done a great job of creating a protagonist that I don’t necessarily like, but do root for.
intricate layers of experience: from the inner wrestling with pain response, through relationship dynamics, to 'toddlers'-eye-view', to OBE and back, to a cliffhanger finale...
The scene you have created here feels as if Paul is walking (or rather hobbling/ dragging himself) through a hall of warped mirrors.
Can't wait to find out what happens next!