Brian Keene: Terminal

She stood up and wrapped her arms around me. When she hugged me, I almost sobbed. Instead, I hugged her back and bit my lip, fighting to keep my emotions in check.

“I love you.”

“I love you too,” I whispered into her ear. “I really do, Michelle. I want you to know that.”

She pulled back, giving me a puzzled look.

“What’s wrong, Tommy?”

I shrugged, fighting back the tears.

“I don’t know. Long-ass day, is all. Long, long day…”

“You’re tired. Let’s go to bed, baby.”

I nodded. My face was buried in her hair, and it smelled so good. I took a deep breath, inhaling her scent.

Holding hands, we walked down the hall, undressed, and slipped beneath the covers. The cool sheets felt good on my skin. We cuddled in the glow of the television. Within minutes, Michelle was breathing softly, sound asleep. I was always amazed at how easily she could fall asleep. I watched her for a long time, the rise and fall of her breasts, the way her forehead wrinkled up as she dreamed. This was when she was most beautiful.

I smiled, content.

Then I remembered I was dying. The fact popped back into my head from out of nowhere. Most people don’t think about dying, especially at the age of twenty-five. The cop walking his beat isn’t dwelling on it, even though he knows that there’s a chance it could happen to him every night. The drunken driver isn’t pondering the ramifications right before he flies through the windshield and becomes a bloody skid mark on the road. For people like that, death happens quickly. It may be there in the back of their head, knowing that it could happen, but they aren’t thinking about it at every second.

What about the everyday schmuck? Do they think about dying when they get up in the morning, take their shower, and spill coffee on themselves during their commute? Do they dwell on it while the boss is hollering at them? Fuck no. Of course not. Human beings don’t walk around thinking about death because we don’t really believe that it’s going to happen to us. Sure, we know that it will happen eventually. Maybe sometimes we even stop and consider for a moment that it could be today. But we don’t know for sure. We’re never one hundred percent positive. Let me tell you, when you know for sure that it’s going to happen, and that it will happen soon, you can’t think about anything else. I tried to, though. I tried to change the subject with myself. I thought about our debt, and how much we owed, and I wondered how the hell we’d ever get out of it. Wondered how Michelle and T.J. would survive it after I was dead. Would they be forced into bankruptcy and living on the street? I watched her sleeping and thought about T.J. and the Lorax and the sound of the axe cutting down the last Truffula tree. The very last one. And after it was gone, everything in the Lorax’s forest had turned to shit. I knew I had to do something, but at that point I wasn’t sure what. The volume on the television was turned down low, so it wouldn’t wake T.J. up. There was a cop show on, and in it, three guys were robbing a bank.

I fell asleep watching it. It looked pretty easy on TV.

I wondered if it was that easy in real life.

So, let me get this straight. You’ve got hair on your dick? Not on your balls but on your dick?

On the shaft?”

“Yeah.” John took another bite of his bologna sandwich. “Doesn’t everybody? You mean that you guys don’t?”

Sherm and I arched our eyebrows at each other, and after a second’s pause we started howling. I sprayed soda across the lunchroom table, I laughed so hard.

“John,” I wiped the soda up with a napkin, “how many guys have you seen in porno movies with hair on their fucking dicks?”

He shrugged. “I just figured they shaved, dog. A lot of those guys shave their balls, you know.”

Still howling, Sherm turned to the table behind us.

“Yo, Louis, check this shit out. John’s got hair on his dick!”

Louis, who ran the Number Four line, looked perplexed.

“What, you mean like around the balls? Don’t we all got that?”

Sherm nodded at John. “Tell ’em.”

Frowning, John’s ears began to turn red.

“I’ve got hair growing up the sides of my dick. It goes about halfway up. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

The entire lunchroom exploded in laughter. John’s ears turned completely scarlet.

“I’m gonna start calling you Carpet Dick.” Sherm chuckled.

That was pretty much how it went every day. We’d file into the lunchroom at twelve, head back out at twenty-five after—just enough time to take a piss or call home before the bell rang and we had to be back in our work areas. Sometimes we talked about sports; how the Orioles and the Ravens and the Steelers were sucking, or listened to the various NASCAR camps debate the drivers; who’d forced who off the track and whether Ford was better than Chevy. Other times it was swimsuit models and porno starlets, or music, or hunting, or the latest movie, or what happened at the strip joint on the edge of town. In between these topics, we razzed each other constantly because that’s what guys do.

I bring this up, not because it’s important that my best friend was a mutant with a hairy dick, but because it was the last good time I can honestly remember before things turned to complete shit. In the last twenty-four hours, I’d been diagnosed with cancer; told that I was dying and that there wasn’t a damn thing anybody could do about it, thrown up a very large and disgusting piece of myself in the toilet, lied to my wife, and learned that the credit card was shut down, the electricity was about to follow, and we couldn’t afford to pay for any of it. But it got worse. It got a lot fucking worse.

The whole day had been progressively bad. I overslept and was almost late for work. I felt like shit. Part of it was depression. It’s not every morning that you wake up and remember that you’re dying. But that’s what I did. I got up, looked at the alarm clock, cursed, shuffled to the bathroom, pissed, and as I was shaking it off, I remembered.

But it wasn’t just the depression. My head was killing me. I swallowed four aspirin with my first coffee, and they had no effect. I stopped on the way to work, bought another cup of coffee and some cigarettes, and puked the coffee back up a few minutes later. The cigarettes tasted like dried dog shit, but I smoked them anyway. My coughing fits came in spurts, and each time one struck, my head felt worse. All morning long, I hocked bloody phlegm into black piles of foundry dirt and covered them up with my boot so that nobody would see them. The heat was bad. By nine in the morning, the temperature inside the foundry usually hovered around ninety-five degrees. That morning was no exception, especially around the furnace and ladle areas, where it was considerably higher. I ran the Number Two line, which was about fifty feet from the furnace. It was scorching in my area. The company provided us with free sports drinks that they kept in big coolers at different areas on the floor. I drank and drank, but it still seemed to sweat right through me. I felt like I had a fever. My mouth tasted funny too—a sickening, sour mixture of sports drink and tobacco and bloody saliva. Sweat ran into my eyes beneath my safety goggles and my skin felt tight and itchy.

The foundry wasn’t just hot; it was dirty and loud too. All day long, forklifts rumbled, dumping hoppers full of scrap metal into the furnaces. Every time they backed up, there was a deafening BEEP BEEP BEEP that made my temples throb. People paged each other over the intercom all day long. Each breath brought more dirt into my lungs. When I went home at the end of each day, our shower turned black as I scrubbed the iron particles and grime from my pores. I was never completely clean until the weekend, when I had two extra days to get the grit out of my system. My arms were a crazy quilt of pockmarks, where burning flecks of metal had spattered them over the last five years. I used to watch the old-timers, wondering if they had started like me. Most of them had ugly burn marks that put my little scars to shame. All of them suffered from a terrible, racking cough; what we jokingly referred to as “black lung.” I remember my old man had it, before he ran off with the waitress and did us all the favor of getting killed.