Who: Avram Where: His room When: Middle of the night, and then around 9 am
Avram had been taking it easy thus far on vacation—he wasn't the world's biggest fan of parties, but he liked to have people around in general. A conversation drifting in from another room while he read a book, the noise and splashing from the pool, a murmur of music from somewhere else in the house. He chatted with Aspen if she was around, or made conversation if he was passing through the kitchen while other people were there, but generally he was keeping things low-key. He was working through Dostoevsky's Notes from the House of the Dead, one of his favourite books in spite of the gloomy-sounding title: prison stories seemed appropriate for the circumstances, and Dostoevsky always came through with the most dramatic and grotesque ones. Yesterday evening he'd gone up to the roof with a makeshift protractor to measure their current latitude—it didn't tell him much, just that they were in the tropics, but so what? It was cool just to be able to figure out that much, and he'd never been able to observe the stars this far south before, which was neat.
He'd gone to bed last night when the house cooled down, and had awakened sometime after midnight. Or he thought he was awake, at least: he couldn't move, and he knew that whatever broken genes lurked in his cells, they were waking up at last. This was, obviously, what his father had to live with every day. Paralysed. During his English elective at MIT, Avram had been witheringly contemptuous of the other 20-year-olds who'd never had to think about mortality until they read that line in Yeats, "sick with desire / And fastened to a dying animal." Happy kids with healthy parents who didn't have to see that dying animal every day. Avram had always been watching himself for the first signs of rot, waiting to see when the sickness would start to destroy him too, and now it seemed that it was happening. Selfish piece of shit gets what he deserves, film at 11.
He could still breathe, in and out like on a ventilator, that same hushhhhh-shhhhhufff that Avram had listened to for days and nights on end, sitting with his father in the ICU and hating every minute of it. Not even scared for his dad—because it seemed like nothing could ever kill his father, nothing was strong enough—no, he'd been scared a few times when something big happened, but mostly he'd just been pissed off and bored.
One day I hope you're as sick as I am, and I hope nobody helps you, his father had told him once, with the poisonous tone of a genuine curse.
And now it felt like that curse had come to pass, the family inheritance destroying him in minutes: his body was numb except for waves of vibrating, prickling shock-like sensations. Yeah, that's called a stroke, genius. Although he struggled to move, he couldn't make his muscles obey.
But he could still see, and there was something else in the room. It was his father, not withered and starved from years of illness, but the way he always appeared in dreams: tall, well-dressed, looking his real age and not forty years older. A stern-looking man, 50% on the way to bald, whose smile always seemed reluctant, though he'd always been a funny guy with a great deadpan.
His father came over to stand by the bed, investigating the damage, and shook his head silently with a sort of that's what you get expression. Avram struggled to speak, to beg for help (what do you think he can do? what could you ever do for him?), but it was impossible to make any sound other than a faint death rattle noise, air forced uselessly past the vocal cords.
His father rested a hand on Avram's chest, at first almost affectionate, but then kept pushing, crunching straight through the bone of his sternum, frangible and weak now. The bones cracked as easily as chalk, but his father didn't stop.
* * *
Avram woke sometime later, sweating—he'd slept on his back, always a bad idea. Sleeping on his back gave him weird dreams. But he was relaxed; another great day in a beautiful resort, with no creepy messages on the computer and no stupid tasks. Any day that he didn't wake up in a mouldy swimming pool was a good day. He got up to shower and went back to lie down on the bed again with the Dostoevsky book. In awhile he'd get breakfast, and maybe lie around beside the pool since that was a quasi-social activity that didn't demand anything much of him. He had to stop when he got to a part of the book that he knew from experience was miserably sad, Dostoevsky talking about the stray dogs who used to live in the prison, how much they comforted the narrator and the ugly fates that awaited them. Once was enough to read about Kultyapka the dog, no need to reread that section.
That gloomy thought somehow triggered the memory of what had happened last night. For a second he felt unmitigated relief that his father was almost certainly dead (yeah, you're a saint) and not alive to show up in Villa Vertice or puncture anyone's lungs with shards of broken bone. That wasn't happening. And if Avram ever did inherit that disease (it's not likely) it wouldn't hit him all at once, just a slow loss of function. And—most importantly—no matter how mad somebody got, they couldn't just will you to get sick. Not even parents could do that to children. Nobody could.