The Meaning of Goodbye

“It was a mistake.”
Alyssa Donald whispered these words to her husband, her breaths coming short and sharp as glass. He’d leaned in tight to catch the words, as intimately close as the last time they’d made love. Roger couldn’t help but remember their last time, being so close to her; the scent of her fresh sweat also flushed the memory to the surface.
Unfortunately, the stench of old sweat staining the bed, along with the stink of antiseptic and diarrhea smeared upon her bedpan was stronger, overpowering the memory. He noticed his wife’s index finger had stopped stroking his palm.
One final release of air, and the heart monitor started to keen. None of the nurses or doctors came running to stabilize its shrieking, since Roger had asked to have some privacy in the last few minutes with Alyssa.
“What?” he demanded. “That’s all you have to say?” Despite the urgency of his words, Roger released her hand gently. Their faces were only inches apart as his eyes searched her jaundiced skin for her answer.
* * * * *
Bill “Roddie” McNaughton, while able to exude the impression of being a relaxed man confident at dealing with the rigors of life, really couldn’t accept situations of extreme stress. He knew intrinsically when this first arose; in fact it was impossible for him to forget the first day he fled his obligations. God, he despised that belt.
Perhaps it was only the scent of antiseptic that twisted his stomach as he paced the hospital waiting for his first child to be born, or it could be the Mexican food he’d gorged himself on two hours before the phone call. Whatever the reason, the churning in his stomach recalled the sensations of that first day he’d avoided responsibility after throwing a temper tantrum and smashing a plate on the dinner table.
* * * * *
“Nah William, you done a disservice and need chastisement,” drawled his mom’s most recent boyfriend. Simply being called William sent a rippling scrawl up his back, since no one else called Roddie so.
“Hand me that belt, boi,” Paul ordered as he pushed his chair back from the table. Roddie stood and walked over to the coat rack where the belt waited, quiescent, to be handled. He picked it up, carefully sliding his hand down the well-oiled leather.
The smack of Paul’s hand upon the table startled Roddie, causing him to spin around to face the source. “Boi! I ain’t playing with you.”
The two shared a long look from across the kitchen. Roddie took one step closer to his stepfather, and then another. His eyes flitted over to the screen door - then it was in front of him, being pushed open with his stick-arms, the belt still held within his hands. He heard Paul bellowing from the house but didn’t look back.
* * * * *
The sensation of needing to piss pulled Roddie from his reverie and back to the hospital. He increased his walking pace, looking around for some signs that might direct him to a bathroom and becoming irritable as his need intensified. It took some twenty minutes of searching before he finally found a toilet, during which he didn’t think once of the reason he was stalking the hospital in the first place.
After his piss, Roddie resumed his hospital walk, not paying attention to any of the directional signs. After passing through a set of double doors he found himself in one of the waiting rooms scattered throughout the building. It was mostly deserted, but one fellow curled up in a ball upon a seat drew Roddie’s attention.
He wasn’t sure quite why, but the man’s posture appeared a physical representation of Roddie’s own internal struggle, although his clothes were far superior to Roddie’s jeans and t-shirt. “I am Roddie’s stomach,” he murmured to himself, thinking of the movie Fight Club. He noticed the man’s blue eyes were fixated straight ahead, and a yellowish tinge clung to his skin. He appeared to be in his late forties or early fifties, with the creases of time upon his face turning to real wrinkles underneath a thinning, straggly mess of blonde hair.
Roddie set himself down directly between the man and the wallpaper he appeared so interested in. The man’s eyes didn’t register the difference. “Your wife giving birth too,” Roddie offered.
The older man’s eyes finally showed some life and focused upon Roddie. “No kids,” he croaked. “They’d a died by the age of five.”
“Well, um, ah, why would your children die by the age of five, if you had ‘em?” Roddie asked.
“Ever do coke?” the other man rasped. “No, looking at you I can already tell, or if you have you’ve never carried a mirror. Twenty years ago a fifth” here he raised one finger and spun it clockwise, “of the people you’d come across skied on the weekends. Bankers, lawyers, the convenience store clerk that sold you cigarettes, the blanket was spread evenly across the job market. Hell, even Bush Jr. did cocaine.”
“I saw that movie Blow,” Roddie said. “I never really saw coke when I was a kid though.”
“George Jung,” the man growled as a red flush crept up his face, overcoming for the moment the yellow tincture staining his skin. “Fuckin’ murderer. My wife Alyssa, she just died…I said goodbye to her, but…”
Here he paused. When he spoke again, his voice was tight and strong. “I’d snap his neck if I had the chance. Sure, we chose it, but we wouldn’t have had the chance, I’da never dragged her into the shit if I knew...”
“If that was twenty years ago, how’d it kill your wife now?” Roddie asked.
“It wasn’t actually the coke that killed us, although that was bad enough…I’ll be dead in a few months myself, even with the medication.
“We’d pass along the same bill, not really noticing how dirty they were,” the fellow continued, rolling together his right thumb and forefinger as if he still clutched one.
“I remember one time, my friend Bill Morterson, he took a few lines. That was some good coke we had, real clean, he didn’t even notice his nosebleed for ten minutes. We kept using the same bill even after that happened.”
“That’s disgusting.”
“Seemed funny at the time, like when you take too big of a bong hit and end up coughing for the next five minutes. Or when someone drinks too much and vomits on a busy sidewalk,” countered the man. “I never said we weren’t stupid.
“Somewhere along the way-never really know for sure, there were too many people in our circle for a day, a weekend, a month…either my wife or I picked up Hepatitis C. Then we passed it along.
“See, Hep C is nasty. It says hello when you first contract it, then disappears for ten, twenty, sometimes thirty years. You never know until your liver’s ready to quit. Most people don’t survive.”
“That’s rough,” Roddie commented, unable to prevent himself from edging away from the man he’d sat down beside.
“Yep, that’s life. I just wish…wish I knew why she said it. I’ve been trying to figure out what she meant.”
“Meaning? Why there gotta be meaning?” Roddie asked.
The man said nothing for a long while. As Roddie was preparing to stand and begin his pacing about the hospital again, the fellow said, “I suppose it’s better, that she said it, even though it meant nothing. Or…even worse, it might mean there was something else she wanted to tell me, but couldn’t. That’s what really eats me up, that maybe there’s a different reason she’s dead, and I’m dying.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s more than one way to pick up a disease.”
Roddie stood. “I should get going, you know.”
The other man’s eyes drifted from Roddie’s face and back to the point at the wall he’d been examining before Roddie interrupted. “Yeah, sure. You’ve got a child being born. An evil spirit might hitch a ride on you. Know if it’s a girl or boy yet?”
“Oh…ah, not sure. She didn’t want to know before the birth. I’ll see you around, maybe.”
“Doubt it.”
Roddie nodded, and returned to wandering.