THE PART TO NO GENESIS
Robert Hill
Copyright 2013 by Robert Hill
After a long day of working in his dingy corner office of the carriage factory he discovered that his back had grown a hump.
And not just a tiny hump, like a knot in his shoulder, as he so oftentimes developed whenever he spent several hours hunched over the ledgers and the production reports, and away from his beloved Mamie. No, this hump was clearly not a knot in either of his shoulders, but rather it rested square upon the upper curvature of his spine. A large hump it was, like one might see on a camel as it gamely trudged through the Sahara.
Now the odd thing, at least beyond the watermelon-size of it (and that was in and of itself very odd), was that when he first arrived at the factory earlier that morning he had no hump (large or small), and did not notice it until finally, having reached near exhaustion, he now leaned back in his chair, and realized he couldn’t lean back at all.
What to do, he wondered, reaching back over his shoulders with both hands to feel the crest of this rapidly grown growth. Through his shirt the hump felt as if it was somehow expanding beneath his skin, stretching it thin and taut like an over-inflated airship. It was smooth and round but otherwise shapeless, quite literally as if someone had inserted an air hose beneath his epidermis and pumped helium inside it to near explosive proportions.
The fog of confusion lifted from his work-clouded brain. He had an enormous hump on his back. Perhaps he should do something about it and do it now. Good heavens, man, he thought, you had best hasten yourself to a doctor!
He jumped up from the chair, now terrified at what this hideous growth must be, and he whirled about, snatching at his overcoat and top hat that was hanging on the rack.
What was going on? How could this be happening? There was so much to do. He had no time to dither with maladies of any sort if he was to get the next line of carriages into full production. He would have to get this looked after immediately, and then back to the factory.
He exited the factory out the back entrance and into the gloom of the evening, not bothering to secure the latch or the lock, even though he had been the only one left within, and then he dashed out into the frigid alleyway where the pavement of cobblestones was slicked over with ice and snow.
How could I let this happen? I’ve definitely been working too much, he thought. But what else was there to be done? The production had to continue. It’s just a muscle problem, this hump, surely.
He took a left turn down a side alley, his swift manner of gait shuffling upon the cobblestones, his boots skidding along the alleyway like ball-bearings in grease.
I can’t believe this is happening, whatever it is. I can’t afford to be unwell …
His boots lost their precarious purchase upon the surface of the earth. He flailed backwards, slipping on the icy stones. He tried to reach out for the wall of the building to his right, to grab a windowsill, but still he flipped off his feet, smacking his right temple upon the stones below.
When he awoke he realized he was in a hospital ward … thankfully. But how long had he been there?
The window to his left was open and it was daylight beyond. At first he started to think he had been knocked unconscious from the blow to his head and that now it was the following morning …
But the window was open, and he could hear birds chirping, and the wind felt fresh, not sharp and biting. Fresh as a lively, spring day – not the dead of winter!
He felt his right temple, expecting to encounter a nasty bump, but then there wasn’t. And just for good measure he felt the left, and none was there either.
And the hump? The hump on his back? He was lying flat on the bed, and he rolled over and reached around, but already knew that it was gone.
Just then a spindly nurse in white with thin black hair stepped into the room. She was carrying sheets and blankets in her twigged arms, but dropped the sheets and blankets upon the floor, shock forcing her pale lips to spread out into a ring shape upon the lower center of her face.
“Sir, my God, you’re awake!” she said. “You’re awake!”
He sat up and looked at her, his brow furrowing, wondering. “Yes, of course, I am. What happened?”
“You’re awake,” was all she repeated and turned like a soldier executing an about-face in the parade. “Doctor! Doctor! The patient in room 29! He’s awake!” he heard her saying as he also heard her shoes clattering down the hall beyond the room.
It wasn’t long – in fact, in short, the doctor came quickly to confirm what the nurse had clearly exclaimed. And then the doctor poked and prodded at him while he, the doctor, attempted to explain how it was that he had come to be in the hospital and the length, thus far, of his stay.
“For two years!” he yelled upon receiving the news that came from the rotund and walrus- mustached physician, who was still prodding and checking his vital functions.
“Yes, sir, asleep right there, unresponsive to any stimuli. Comatose, for all intents and purposes, and we were surprised to see you recover at all.”
“Two years?” he said, less loudly this time, again his brow furrowing. “And what about my wife?”
“Wife, sir?” said the doctor, stopping in mid-prod.
“Yes, where is she?”
“Sir, we did not even know who you were, much less that you had a wife …”
“But my papers … my personal effects …”
“None were on you when you arrived.”
“But she would have … Surely, after two years …”
The doctor remained stoic.
“And what happened to the hump?”
“Hump, sir?” This time the doctor’s right brow rose like a curious boy popping his head above a hedge row.
“Yes, it was the reason I rushed out of the factory. I had stopped everything because of this enormous hump on my back, just like Quasi Modo, it was so big!”
The doctor stepped back and then walked to the foot of the bed, pulling from a hanging peg a medical chart. The doctor started going through the chart, flipping page after page. “There is nothing in the history of a hump, or any sort of lesion, or edema ... On your back, you said?”
“Yes, yes, back here!” he said, the ‘yes’s hissing out of him as he reached with his right hand over his right shoulder.
“Sorry, sir, but you were brought in with head trauma and slipped into a coma. No other maladies whatsoever.”
“But it was bigger than a melon, I tell you.”
Again the doctor became stoic.
“But, but … this is outrageous!”
He swung his feet out of the bed, sitting up, and he started to rise. But then he felt a bit dizzy and more than a bit weak in the knees as he attempted to stand.
The doctor swooped close to catch him and set him back on the edge of the bed. “Where do you think you are going?”
“Home! To see my wife. She must be grief-stricken. Two years! My God!”
“Your wife, sir.” It wasn’t a question this time.
The statement that wasn’t a question stunned him just at the moment when the dizziness he’d momentarily felt had abated and a clarity as to the dimensions of the room focused in the right directions within his addled head.
“Oh, I see. You don’t think I have a wife.”
“But, sir, I didn’t …”
“You think I hit my head, knocked me out for two years, comatose, and I woke up fancying that I’ve dreamt the whole thing up because I must have rattled things around in here, have you?” he said, his fist knocking at the side of his skull.
“But two years, sir. If you had a wife … I mean … you would think she … I mean … well. Y
ou were kind to her, sir, weren’t you?”
He exploded from the edge of the bed and came completely upright on his feet, garbed only in a cotton gown. “What kind of … of all the … I don’t have an explanation for it, Doctor … Sir! But I am going to find out, that much is certain.”
It wasn’t much longer after that, but certainly to him it seemed like an eternity, before he found himself out of the hospital and stomping across town, heading straight for home. All the while, as he barely noticed the carriages clopping by, and the people strolling along the cobblestones, he wondered at the incredible events that had occurred, and he grew frothy with anger at all of it.
Two years! A hump, then no hump. And the Missus? What in the devil could have occurred that she … that no one … had even come looking for him in two years?
And then he suddenly found himself at the front door of his flat. Two years, surely, but hardly a thing had changed. Flowers were budding in the bed, and there was still that damnable crack in the exterior facing …
He trudged to the door and went to turn the handle, but it wouldn’t budge. Blasted, he didn’t have any keys, gone two years now along with his other personal effects.
He pounded on the faded oak of the door. “Mamie! Open up! Open up, I say! It’s me!”
The door swung open, and there was his beloved, wonderful, and bright Mamie, standing there in her day attire – a long dress of sky blue, her auburn hair in a bun and all proper. Bright, shining Mamie … even after two whole years!
She was just standing there, though. Stoic, just like the doctor had been.
“It’s me,” he said. “I’m alive! You would not know what happened … there was this hump … and I hit my head … and why didn’t you come look for me?”
And then he saw someone else looming in the backdrop of the foyer of his flat.
The most incongruous notion came to his mind at that instant. He thought how odd that Mamie has somehow mounted a full-length looking glass facing the front door right there behind her in the foyer. Why would she do such an odd thing?
But then the reflection in the looking glass stepped a little closer, almost as if to emphasize some fancy of protectiveness toward Mamie.
“Who are you?” he said to the man whom he determined was not his reflection, and, rather, looked like a twin he knew he had never had.
He then glanced from the twin to Mamie, his eyes exploding wide, like blue-colored daisies in the spring rain.
“Mamie, who is this man?”
“He’s my husband,” she replied, matter-of-factly.
“No, he’s not! Look, dear, he may look like me,” he said, waggling his finger at the twin that was not his twin. “But I’ve been in a coma for two years in the hospital. You see, I hit my head. Comatose, they said I was. And, anyway, that man is an imposter!”
He moved to step through the threshold, to push past Mamie, to grab this fiend, this criminal, who had insinuated himself into his home during his most unfortunate absence. He would have this fraud and tear him to pieces!
“Imposter, I say!”
But Mamie put her hands up, placing each on his arms, bracing him back, and blocking his advance into the foyer.
“I know,” Mamie said.
He blinked. “What?”
“I know who he is,” she replied.
“You … you do?”
“He told me the night he arrived.”
“He did?”
“Yes, I know all about it.”
“But …”
“The fact of the matter is he’s a good man. And one who’s been here for me … and the babies …”
“Babies? We don’t have any babies …”
“No, we didn’t because you were too busy. A slave to your business and your customers. I hardly saw you, much less had time to start a family. It was like being married to a stranger … so what difference did it make if he were an imposter … a part of you that formed and dropped off you one night in a back alley in the dead of winter. At least it was the best part of you, and the part that chose to be a little more attentive. So he stayed, which is more than I can say for you. So, off you go now. We’ve got supper to eat, and we don’t want to see you coming around here no more.”
And then she did the most shocking thing. She shoved him back away from the door.
Why, he had never ever experienced such a brusque handling from her. It was like … he ... well … it just befuddled him. Shocked him, it did, as if she were also some strange imposter who had taken the place of his beloved …
“I said off you go!” And with that Mamie slammed the door in his face.
Silence for a stunned moment, and then …
“Mamie?” he muttered, barely audible in the bright sunshine of the afternoon.
The latch clacked to lock, and he could hear her footsteps retreating into the recesses of their flat … his flat, he thought. His wife. His life.
Somehow, in the gentle breeze of the mid-evening, he found himself no longer standing at the doorway, no longer stumbling along the walk past the closed shops, no longer noticing the carriages and the people passing by, and no longer noticing that he had removed his suit and his boots as he entered the hospital room where he had awakened earlier in the day.
Yes, he no longer noticed the spindly nurse or the walrus-mustached doctor who furtively hovered about him as he slipped back into his cotton hospital gown, swung his feet over onto the bed, and then reclined upon the crisp sheets where he no longer noticed anything at all within the deep womb of yet another comatic spell.
THE END
AUTHOR’S BIOGRAPHY
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