Awakening by Douglas Baker

It happens when you’re thinking about other things. It’s been this way for almost everyone, and now it’s your turn. Some sleepless nights, first, which isn’t out of the ordinary for you. But you develop a nagging cough. Also nothing new so you don’t worry about it. Until you still have it two months later. A slight chuckle becomes a coughing fit, right there in the meeting. You can be heard at twenty yards, around the winding hallway’s bend, the cough getting closer, pounding like parade drums. People know it’s you in the bathroom stall. You imagine them exchanging looks at the urinal, at the sink. A colleague jokes about tuberculosis. You feel like a Dostoevsky character, slowly dying in your office, your baby at home sucking the dry breasts of your suffering wife. 

At night, you wake to hold the crying baby, but your cough overpowers you, and you set the child back on the crib mattress and double over in pain. Nothing comes up, just rattling air escaping your inflamed lungs in bursts, what the doctors call an unproductive cough. Unproductive: in your line of work that’s an insult. The child’s cries become screams. He vomits, but you can’t pick him up because he’s scared of your cough and you fear you’ll drop him. You try to slow your breathing, to calm down, but the child vomits again. It bubbles up from within him, a creamy white foam, like melted white chocolate, spilling out the sides of his mouth, running down his face. The child’s vomiting only aggravates your cough. Eventually, your wife, exhausted and angry, pushes you aside and scoops up the baby and takes him to the other room. You see it’s now four a.m. so you go to the dining room table and open your laptop to send some emails.

Two weeks before Christmas you notice a vague pain in your gut. You ignore it. But several days later, the pain grows worse. Not terrible, but steady and undeniable, worse when you cough. You tell yourself it’s nothing. Maybe it’s just your back: every week, sixty hours in a chair while your brain does things with a computer. You call your PCP and schedule an appointment the week before Christmas. He insists on tests—bloodwork, scans—because of your family history: your mother and two of four grandparents. All three dead. 

In the waiting room, as you prepare for your CT, you open your laptop and find a string of urgent emails. An emergency conference scheduled for that afternoon. A motion for sanctions alleging you improperly withheld documents. Several client emails asking why you haven’t responded to emails sent earlier that morning. You begin typing out quick responses, hoping the nurse will delay a little longer. You forget about your gut pain and your cough and your dead mother and grandparents; your focus narrows to the words before you. You type, you delete, you type again. You copy a colleague—a man who is overconfident in his conclusions—and say he will handle any follow-up as you will be “out of pocket” for the next two hours. You hate yourself for saying “out of pocket.” 

You are still typing when your name is called. It sounds foreign, and so you don’t look up. The nurse repeats it just when you are scanning past your email signature. You slide your laptop into your briefcase and follow the nurse through a door. Suddenly you notice the hospital smell, cleaning solution pasted over something both human and inhuman—death and dying and all the efforts of man and machine to extract disease from the body. You can hear the chatter of machinery, tones and beeps and hums, like so many birds. Voices too, some televised, some real. 

You can’t decide if the pain is still there. Maybe you made it all up. A cough and some abdominal pain seem so trivial, not worth bothering the doctor. As you wind through hallways, you realize you never hit send on the last email. You pull the briefcase to your chest and unfasten the clasp and remove the laptop. Security protocols mandate a twenty-digit password containing capital letters and special characters. You try to type in the password with one hand. The nurse is way up there now. She disappears around a corner and then steps backward so you can see her. Did she just tap her foot? She looks you in the eye. She is irritated. You say, “Yes, sorry, forgot to hit send, if you can just give me a second, I’ll…” But she’s walking again, and you still haven’t entered your password. You’re in yet another hallway, wondering, how big is this hospital? The nurse’s scrubs are whishing fast. Someone bumps you going the other way, another nurse wheeling a large robotic apparatus, and neither of you says sorry. You get your password entered, but now the laptop isn’t connected to internet. The nurse, your nurse, turns left into a room. You’re focused on the computer, glancing intermittently at the hallway. You click the internet connection icon. As the little symbol is bouncing around, attempting to reconnect, you turn into the room. 

You look up now. You’re thinking about whether your colleague got the message, what your boss will say, how your client will react—you can almost hear their chiding voices. And then your eyes focus on the room for the first time. There before you is the machine: a thin white tunnel. Hospital personnel are going about their business. For a moment no one notices you. You stand staring at the instrument of judgment and everything else drops away. The briefcase becomes dead weight, the laptop a piece of plastic, metal, and glass. You see your body now—your small gut, your dry and veiny hands, your slumped shoulders—and then you stare at the machine that will soon deliver its verdict, and the nurse says in a mechanical voice, “Please remove your clothes.” 

Douglas Baker lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, with his wife and two children.