the newspaper groans

When he woke up, he groggily wiped his mouth with the back of his arm and afterward he noticed there was red smeared from his forearm to his wrist, which startled him awake like a bath of cold water because he had no idea why he would be leaking from his face. Instinctively he tossed his head back (so as to avoid getting blood all over his sheets) and he hurried from the bed over to the bathroom.

His reflection in the bathroom mirror was a frightening sight. Blood ran down from his nostrils and out of the corners of his eyes and mouth. Some of it had dried in black, crusty heaps and fresh blood rolled over and around these patches the way streams flow over and around rocks in their path. And he had bed-head (his hair was a mess) and blood trickled down from his scalp as well and his sideburns were matted in blood and suddenly his face started to throb painfully, though in retrospect he believes this was most likely a psychosomatic phenomenon.

He tilted his head back as far as he could and winced up at the ceiling, thinking that this turn of events was very serious indeed and he groped at the wall for a towel, coming to the necessary but disturbing conclusion that this emergency required the wasting of an otherwise perfectly nice towel. As soon as his hand blindly made contact with one of the towels hanging on the rack (he was still staring up at the ceiling), he brought the towel immediately to his face and as he did so he noticed fleetingly (and with slight tinge of agitation) that he had picked up his favorite towel.

He did not know where exactly to apply pressure because the blood seemed to be coming out of everywhere and so he tried to press the towel over the maximum surface area possible. Nearly suffocating himself with the towel (he was recklessly panicked at this point) he coughed violently and a warm liquid bubbled up his throat with the cough (a very unpleasant sensation) and he took the towel away to confirm his fear that he had just coughed up an enormous glob of blood and he then realized that the profuse bleeding was internal and the seat of his boxers suddenly felt sticky and wet and he looked down to witness (in horror) streams of blood flowing down his legs from his boxers and this was the exact moment that he had an extreme anxiety attack, or maybe he just went into shock, I must of gone into shock, he thought, I had never in my wildest dreams imagined that something so disturbing could happen. I paused, trying to reorder the scene in my head.

It’s beyond any rational explanation, commented Harry and I noticed that he looked a little pale as if he was going to be sick despite the calmness of his voice. We were sitting in a crowded café with cups of coffee in front of us (this was years after the incident) and for some reason seeing Harry’s nausea of how I was manipulating his imagination made me want to keep going on with the story, though I had to fill in some details because my memory is a little hazy from the moment I first went into shock.

After a few moments (though maybe longer) I recovered slightly and stumbled out of the bathroom. I started screaming for my mother (I was sixteen years old, but in moments like this, there’s nowhere more natural to turn and I bet that even fifty year-olds were wailing for their mothers that day) and the high pitch of my scream must have alarmed her because she came running out of her room (I was in the hallway, swaying slightly, naked except for my boxers and literally covered in blood) and when she saw me she started screaming.

Wow, said Harry.

I felt light-headed and must have lost consciousness because suddenly I was hanging loosely in my father’s arms, swaddled in sheets and we were out in the morning sunlight, in the driveway and next to the car and my mother was struggling with the keys to get the door of the car opened and when she finally succeeded in unlocking it my father laid me across the backseat and then backed hurriedly away to close the door and rushed around to the driver’s side and I caught a fleeting glimpse of his white button up shirt stained with fresh blood.

As my father started the car my mother, twisting around in her seat, leaned into the back and took my hand and stroked and it and spoke soothing words, though I can’t remember exactly what she was saying, maybe I couldn’t even understand her then I was so out of it, but she spoke softly and I stared up at the ceiling of the car, sometimes squeezing my eyes shut and desperately trying to take control of my breathing, a task that seemed above all else the most critical (my mother’s voice and the shock of the situation bringing me into a state of surreal lucidity) and slowly I started to slow my breathing down and I turned my head to smile reassuringly over at my mother and . . . thinking back, it seems like a satire of a nightmare (though it was highly disturbing at the time) . . . I saw that she had blood running out of the corner of her mouth and I started screaming so loudly that my mother screamed too and my father swerved the car and there was a screech of wheels and the throw of inertia as I babbled, dizzy and hysterically pointing at my mother’s face which was twisted into this grotesque expression and the blood was running down her blouse and she touched her face and she started screaming all the more loudly and turned around, away from me, suddenly forgetting all about me and she kept yelling, actually shrieking in a glass shattering pitch:

John! John! John! (my husband’s name) over and over again, as if he could do something for me, I thought I was dying, actually dying, and John put his foot down hard on the accelerator and started weaving desperately through the traffic and I had no idea what the hell was going on, it was like a fucking horror movie, like one of those shitty horror movies that come on the television at four in the morning, my wife and kid covered in blood, staining the seats and everything else in the car, and all I’m thinking is that I have to get them to the hospital (George had stopped making noise and in my panic I jumped to the conclusion that he was dead, though he had only fainted and Regina was mad with – whatever – fear I guess – and she was screaming louder every second to the point that I thought my eardrums would tear) and I swiped a car as I sped through a red light, taking a sharp left turn, there was this sound of crinkling aluminum and this inertial slap but the contact was just a glance, the tip of a corner meeting the tip of someone else’s corner, but at the speed we were going I nearly lost control of the car and I wrestled the steering wheel (I don’t know how I was keeping my head), and I remember looking over at my husband when we hit that car, there was this sound of shattering glass and this sudden whiplash, and I looked over at him and felt my eyes roll back and I don’t remember much from that point on.

The hospital was like a mad house. There were hundreds of people swarming into the building, so many of them covered in blood, I was one of the few who didn’t seem to bleeding. The screaming that day is what really sticks out in my memory. It was like a invisible shrapnel bomb had been dropped on the city and the wails of all the wounded were resounding. Not that anyone was injured. No one bled to death. In fact, no one even seemed to have lost any blood. All the yelling and crying was more because everyone felt like they were dying or something. Hemorrhaging off to death, but that wasn’t the case.

Looking back, I kind of wish that I’d started bleeding too. It sounds silly, but you know, it was like this bizarre phenomenon that I never had the opportunity to experience.

In the waiting room the nurses were running around trying to maintain order and some of them started bleeding too. I had managed to get both Regina and George in there, but not to much use. They didn’t have enough room for everyone, nor nearly enough staff, not that it would have mattered if I had actually gotten a doctor to look at them because the doctor’s were all baffled as to where the blood was coming from. People were cramming themselves into every corner of that waiting room, into every nook and cranny, as if they’re presence in it would help the situation. Blood stained everything, it was disgusting, there seemed to be a limitless supply of this stuff. I’ve read articles since that day in which authors argued that the past we sat atop of had suddenly leaked through, or something as nonsensical as that. I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything so baffling.