The Cabin at the End of the World(19)
His ears are not ringing now. His headache isn’t a sharp pain and is instead an insistent pressure radiating out from the back of his skull, lodging against his forehead, throbbing in sync with his heartbeat. The sunlight pouring through the shattered slider doors is an assault under which he withers and cannot escape. Eric lowers his head and turns away from the light despite how much it hurts to move his head in the slightest. Even squinting is painful as it feels like he’s pushing his eyes back into his head where there is simply no more room for anything. The damned light finds its way through closed eyelids, anyway, creating a blotchy red mapping of his torture.
The woman in the white shirt is behind him, cleaning up the cut on the back of his bald head. She says, “Try not to move. Almost done.”
The light in the cabin mercifully dims as the late-afternoon sun hides behind clouds. Unable to walk out onto the back deck, Eric has no way of knowing how long the cloud relief will last. Waves of nausea rise and fall and his view of the cabin has a haze, as though he’s looking through a dirty window.
Eric is sitting in a kitchen chair. His legs are tied to the chair’s wooden legs with white rope about a quarter inch thick. His hands and arms are bound behind his back, and by the feel of it, they used the same rope or cord with the wrapping thickest around his wrists. He wiggles his fingers and attempts to flex and bend his wrists, but it all somehow increases the pressure in his head.
Andrew is similarly restrained in a chair offset to Eric’s right. Andrew’s head is down and his long hair obscures his face. His chest rises and falls evenly, straining against the loops of rope that affix his torso to the chair backing. Eric cannot remember if anyone struck or attacked Andrew, and he does not remember how they got to be anchored to the chairs. He remembers running for the door and falling and then seeing the ceiling from an impossible distance below.
He doesn’t know if Andrew has already begged and pleaded with the others to leave them alone, to let them go. He doesn’t know if Andrew and the others have come to some sort of bargain or agreement. Did Andrew give in, surrender? Andrew hasn’t surrendered to anyone or anything in his life and it’s a big part of why Eric loves him. He remembers jagged pieces of the whispered conversation they had by the barricaded basement stairs and laughing at hitting the others with logs and how Andrew was willing to stay behind in order to get Eric and Wen to the SUV. Eric wants to ask Andrew a question, but he’s afraid to ask the wrong one.
Wen is unrestrained. She sits on the floor between Eric and Andrew, her legs crossed atop a pile of pillows and blankets scavenged from one of the bedrooms. The three of them fill the area where the couch had once occupied the common room.
The couch is now up against the far wall, below the flat-screen TV. Redmond is the gargoyle of the couch, perched, slouched forward, grunting and muttering to himself. He dabs his nose and swollen lips with a white kitchen hand towel, checking for blood.
The woman in the black shirt is on the deck, readjusting the screen door slider in its frame. It won’t stay in the track and she says, “Goddammit,” each time it falls out and in an accent that is not of New England.
Leonard is in the kitchen, sweeping broken glass into a metal dustpan. He dumps the debris into the garbage. The high-pitched frequency of grinding and breaking glass is as loud as a crumbling skyscraper, and the noise overstresses the hardware in Eric’s head.
Wen’s favorite show, Steven Universe, is on the TV, playing a few feet above Redmond’s head. The TV’s volume is too much for Eric. He has asked multiple times that they turn it down, and Leonard did as was asked the first two times but has since only pretended to turn down the volume, picking up the remote and pointing it at the TV, but no red volume bar then shows on the screen.
The woman in the white shirt finishes taping a pad of folded-up paper towels to the back of Eric’s head. She says, “I don’t think you need stitches, but it’s a pretty nasty cut back there.” The scalp on the back of his head is numb. He wants to feel the dressing with his fingers, verify its physical existence, but cannot.
With the sunlight still cowering behind clouds, the pressure in his head lowers out of the code-red range. Eric looks down at Wen. He wants her to talk to him, to say something, anything. He says, “Hey, Wen. I’m finally a match, you know?” He twists his head and shows off the bandaging. “Like I belong with you guys now. This isn’t like, um, me shaving. It’s going to be real now.” He isn’t explaining himself well. He means to say he’ll now have a scar on his head just like Wen and Andrew have on theirs.
Wen doesn’t speak and she keeps her eyes on the TV. Scooting over closer to Eric, she leans her head against his legs.
That Eric will now have a real, legit scar fills him with unexpected happiness, and he laughs, but then he thinks about the next time he shaves and how Wen won’t need to inspect his bald head for nicks and fake scars that always fade away in a matter of hours. The scar will already be there, red and permanent. Losing that odd little post-head-shaving ritual with Wen is suddenly the saddest thing he can think of and his odd laughter morphs into a grotesque mix of manic, percussive cackles and uncontrollable, chest-heaving sobs. Having recently (and obsessively) read about the many, often undiagnosed concussive blows football and soccer players suffer, Eric is able to recall that having wild, unpredictable emotional swings is a symptom of a severe concussion, but it doesn’t help and doesn’t stop his tears.