SUNNY was always embarrassed when he’d tell people how they met. But it was an interesting story, so he’d loosen her up. There’d be laughing, teasing, usually pouring another drink if not a few, and always making sure to start the story off by saying “It could have happened to anyone”.
Halfway through she’d inevitably, almost routinely, start to cry with guilt about his injuries. When this happened, Andrew and whomever their audience happened to be would harmonise in unison. A reassuring cry of “It wasn’t your fault”. Andy believed it, and that helped the audience to as well.
It wasn’t as if he’d be engaged to a girl who’d purposely hit him with her car.
HE had been hitchhiking along the coastal highway, an age from any town, but close to one of the best national parks in the country. That particular day, he remembered, he’d been standing in thirty degree heat for about six hours. He’d been forced to sleep on the side of the road, not wanting to camp in the bush for fear of missing a crucial friendly driver. He’d been misinformed about hitchhiking, told by most of his friends that it was the best way to see a country. It may have been in the past, but hitchhiking in the modern age was tough. Almost every driver had been told that opening a door to a hitchhiker was opening the door to your own murder. Couple that with the desolate landscape, and youhad the three day stretch without a lift that he’d been enduring – not for the first time. He’d been thinking for about the millionth time that he should have just driven, or bussed or anything except fucking hitchhiking. He’d been thinking that when he got home, he was going to burn all of his Kerouac books. He’d been thinking that when the car hit him.
He’d woken up in hospital glad to be amongst the living, and thinking how he could sue the dirty sonofabitch who’d wrecked his legs. His doctor had told him that whoever had hit him, along with the motorcycle policeman who’d happened to come by moments after the accident, had saved his life. Working together they had laid him in the car that had hit him and sped him to safety, the cop clearing the way with his lights and the makeshift ambulance streaming behind. Andy didn’t care. They may have saved his life, but his doctor had told him that he’d never walk without assistance again. That he’d be lucky if he could even function without the pain meds he was prescribed. Someone, he remembered thinking, was going to fucking pay.
Then she’d walked through his door, 5 feet tall and every inch incredible. Her name was Sunny, and although she couldn’t stop crying for the first two weeks that she met him, it fit her perfectly. She felt so guilty that she’d cut up her license. It had taken a year of pleading from him to convince her to get a new one. She may have hit him, but he was in love, and all thoughts of bitterness fled his mind. As he said to Sunny when he proposed; “If I had to trade my legs to meet you then it’s still the best damn trade I’ve ever made”.
Andy had moved into her house. It had been renovated, “evolved” she had said, to meet his needs. His needs now included handrails at the toilet and a seat in the shower. He could take a bath, at first only with Sunny’s help, but later he could lower himself in from his chair with ease. He spent hours there, looking at the mural on the ceiling. In it, a mother cradled her child, who must have scraped his knee somehow. It soothed him; the sobbing child in the foetal position, comfortably cradled by its giant mother.
He should have felt pain, both emotional and physical. But love is a powerful anaesthetic, and in combination with the literal painkillers he was on, he’d been dosed to the point where he felt nothing at all. They’d made love that night for the first time, Sunny gently easing her tiny frame onto him, her movements slow out of intimacy and a fear of hurting him. Even the bed had a handrail, but he wasn’t looking at that. So much easier to focus on her. Actually, he was finding it hard to focus on anything. The meds kept him pretty out of it, but luckily Sunny took care of remembering what medicine to take, with what, and when. Lucky he had Sunny. He remembered being embarrassed because he didn’t wake up until midday the day after he had proposed. She hadn’t been around, her side of the bed was cold, and for the first time since he’d left the hospital he didn’t feel like a proper man. He remembered that his wheelchair was on the far side of the room, and that he’d had to sit, emasculated and depressed for the longest five minutes of his life until she came up the stairs. Andy made sure his wheelchair was always within reach after that.
Sunny was out of the house a lot more than Andy. He understood, she had to work, and being the sole earner at the moment put a lot of pressure on her. She’d work early mornings, late nights, overnight trips – whatever she could do to put a crust on the table. It was a regular occurrence to wake up without her, knock himself out with a pill and then wake up to her smiling face. If he woke up with her, he knew they would be spending the day together. When he left the house, it was with her, he needed her support to get around. Besides, nothing, apart from Sunny, really interested him anymore.
Sunny was his angel, taking on the burden of administering his meds, soothing him after his nightmares. They came with the fever- a conscious dream- a sweaty silent delirium. Andy never told Sunny (she felt guilty enough), but the nightmares were always of the crash. Always nearly identical to actual events. Heat, hitchhiking, cursing Kerouac – the only, awful divergence comes at the end.
He remains conscious, not just when, but after the car hits him. He feels his bones twist in their sockets, and the painkillers do not, will not, work in dreams. He sees his blood spray in the air, and feels a curious giddiness as he himself is knocked like a fleshy bowling pin into the air. But that isn’t the worst part. The worst part is always, always the end. Twisted, broken and bleeding on the ground he watches a smiling Sunny calmly exit the Bug. She ignores him, dying in front of her, and turns to examine the front of the Bug. As in real life, the sturdy V.W shows no sign of the impact. Turning her gaze onto him, he is always shocked by her lack of compassion. She calmly surveys the ruin the impact made of him. The nightmare always ends the same way. Sunny reaches inside what remains of his left leg. She takes a firm grasp with her hand, and drags him screaming towards the front of the Bug. She takes pleasure in the immense pain this causes, at his shrieks and pleas, twisting her tiny hand inside his leg. Andy wants to wake up, has to wake up so desperately. But he can’t.
He never can. She lifts him, as one might a child, and tosses him into the deep boot of the V.W. She tells him then, this creature who looks like his Sunny but can’t be, could never be. She tells him of the horrors, the blasphemies and the tortures that she will inflict upon him. This is always the worst part, the repulsive, horrible things coming from the face closest to his heart. But he doesn’t wake up, can never wake up – until she shuts the boot.
The most disconcerting part of the nightmares is how close they are to reality. He remembers how grateful he felt, how happy he still feels when he imagines the rescue. Sunny, trying desperately to lift him into the car, her tiny frame dragging his huge one. The motor-cycle cop, the happiest coincidence of all, who happened upon the scene and helped lift his dead weight into her boot. The two of them driving as fast as the Bug could go, screaming along the desolate highway to save his life. They’d saved him. She’d saved him. So he never mentioned the nightmares, to Sunny or the Doctor, or anyone. He made up a different one, about walking through a field made of treacle, for when Sunny asked. He didn’t see how that was scary, but he’d read a story with it once, and besides, it earned him a lot of sympathy blow-jobs.
The stairs remained the only barrier between them. They were steep, narrow and twisted straight down from the main corridor. At the bottom of them, Sunny had told Andy, was a basement. Boxes, the washing machine and the laundry- that was all there was down there. The garage opened into it, but there was a small four stair climb into the basement itself, and those four stairs may as well have been Everest for Andy. There was no way Sunny would ever be able to pull him up even one stair, you only had to look at her to see her tiny frame couldn’t manage to lift him.
The steps had remained un-evolved, even after their engagement. Both Sunny and Andy agreed that it was a waste of money to install a lift into what was essentially a basement. Their money, they decided, was better spent planning the wedding. Andy secretly thought that it was a great excuse to get out of doing his own washing. So, agreeably, the stairs remained unhospitable to Andy, and the basement a mystery. Life went on. Two years went past like two minutes, although Andy thought that might more than a little to do with the meds he still had to take. The side effects were nasty, and Andy would be knocked out or feverish for hours on end. But they killed the pain. Andy, though he lived in a Sunny-centric world, was happy. He had woken without her. Smiling, he made his way to the bathroom, poured himself a bath and popped another pill. When he woke, he thought with a smile, Sunny would have returned.
He woke, as usual, with eyes blurred and mind slow. The drugs always left him dazed and it took him a minute or two to regain his surroundings. But today it wasn’t just the drugs. The last thing he remembered was being warm and content in his bath. The cold, dusty air made him shiver and cough simultaneously. He twisted from his sprawled position, his neck arching upwards like a flower towards the sun. Looking up, he could see the familiar mural on the ceiling of his bathroom. But it was about two metres further than it usually was.
He could see, in between the mural and himself, the rotting floorboards that must have given way beneath him. He could feel the cold edge of a shard of bathtub pressing against his spine. His hand brushed against something that was disconcertingly soft against his palm. He was, he supposed, in the basement beneath his bathroom.
From what Sunny had told him, the laundry was below the bathroom, but the room he could see was a laundry only in the sense that there was a washing machine in the corner of her room. It was most definitely, he decided, her room.
He knows. Instantly. He knows before he spots the huge bunches of torn and bloody clothes that are piled next to the washing machine. Soiled and soaked with grime even more than blood, they are the unofficial uniform of the drifters, the homeless, and the down on their luck. He knows before he sees the pit. Filled with the mixed and mangled remains of the fresh and the not-so fresh, yet curiously emanating no smell.
He knows. Because he knows, he scrabbles desperately, trying to right himself on ruined legs. He hasn’t used his legs in three years. Without Sunny, the only way he can move is with his chair.
He spots it, on its side in a pool of dirty bathwater – two meters away. He tries to pull himself forward with his arms, cutting his hands on broken bathtub and other, horrific objects. He tries, desperately, to leave this room, this house, this girl. The failure to move even an inch is absolute. He has nothing left.
He brings his stumps up into his bleeding, stinging hands and pretends he is the infant in the mural. He cries because he knows that everything is not going to be alright. That nothing has been right in a long time. That he’ll never be alright again.
Because he knows.
Not nightmares. Memories.
Wasted Hours & Warnings 