Who: Avram [Narrative] Where: His Room When: Morning
At home, Avram slept on the living room couch. At first it had just been for bad times, passing out there on nights when his father was up all night vomiting, waking frequently to monitor the situation: checking the vomitus for the telltale "coffee grounds" that meant internal bleeding, emptying the bowl, taking away the soiled towels and bringing fresh ones, holding the limp weight of his body while he used the commode chair, and most of all, arguing. I know you want me to give you something, Dad, and I want to give you something too, okay? There's nothing I can do. You've had the Protonix already, just wait for it to work...
But gradually, the couch nights became routine. His father never slept much, catnapping in his recliner chair, unable to lie flat—he would have choked. For awhile, Charles used a buzzer to wake his son when he needed something, which was irritating but effective. After the first seizure, Avram gave up entirely on sleeping in his own bedroom; the buzzer wouldn't help.
Sometimes every three hours, sometimes every ten minutes, always at increasing volume: "Avi? Avi. Hey. Hey. Avram. Wake up, you're so lazy, wake up..."
It might be for something important ("I have to go"), or for something completely stupid ("tell that fat girl I don't want her to come here anymore"), or it might be an emergency ("my tube came out and now there's blood"). There was no way to know, so Avram had to wake up every single time, up and at 'em as quickly as his brain could process.
Those were the good old days.
The recliner was later replaced with a hospital bed, rented from a medical equipment store at great expense. Insurance was fickle about covering that. The bed dominated the living room, aimed toward the TV so that Charles could still watch the news. CNN all day long. When the dementia set in, Charles couldn't always remember Avram's name, or couldn't connect the wires enough to actually say it. He gave up on words then and just made a raucous, goatish noise, like a baby: "Ennnnnh. Annnnnnhhh."
In a movie, that would have been heartbreaking. In reality, it drove Avram fucking nuts. Getting summoned all day and all night like a servant was one thing, but he couldn't tolerate losing even that minimum of civility—and these days his father was never civil for long. There was a difference between being treated like a servant and being treated like a dog. Avram would wake up pissed off, and feeling guilty about it because what kind of person gets angry at an old man for suffering like this?
You're such a nice boy, the old women in the neighbourhood would tell him when they saw him at the grocery store, ignoring the fact that he was nearly forty. You're so nice to your poor father.
He didn't know what to say in response.
The bed in his room at Zenith was the only luxury he seriously cared about. It was big, the mattress was full of bullshit NASA science, the pillows were lofty and new, nothing in the room smelled like vomit or Lysol, and he could sleep through the night.
Usually.
When he heard his father's voice the first time, he bolted up instinctively, like an old firehorse at the sound of the bell, and was on his feet and halfway across the room before he woke up enough to remember that his father wasn't here. That was almost a nice moment, like thinking you were late to class and then remembering that it was Saturday.
He chalked it up to his brain messing with him, and went back to bed (because fuck getting up early after yesterday's ordeal), but had just barely drifted off when he heard it again. This time it wasn't the wordless bleating but rather a cry that was actually rare: "Help, help..."
Avram could count the number of times he'd heard help on one hand, and all of them had been extremely goddamn serious. In the most floridly fucked up of those incidents, very early on in the course of his illness, his father had fallen down the basement stairs. Backwards, onto an unfinished concrete floor. Unbelievably, he'd not only survived but had crawled back up the stairs and dialled the phone, reaching Avram at his apartment in Boston: help. Inna had been out running errands, and she said that she came back to find blood smeared all over the phone and the wall like a murder scene. Help meant his father had no pride left, that shit was out of hand, and that Avram had fucked up. Help scared the shit out of him.
The third time, he realised that it wasn't just his brain replaying old stimuli in the twilight weirdness of the hypnopompic state. It was the motherfucking house, which apparently had a library of recordings of his father's various noises and cries. They thought that was funny, they thought that was worthy of experimenting, the fact that Avram had been saving up his grief for fifteen years, and that now he was stuck in a different kind of limbo.
And he snapped, the anger and fear and exhaustion finally getting to him, and threw the closest thing to hand at the wall. Desk lamp with a heavy china base. It shattered, and it wasn't enough. He turned on the computer just to see if the assholes had anything to say for themselves, but there was no message waiting. He was shaking and white with rage as he threw some clothes on and left the room, slamming the door hard enough to make the windows rattle.