The phone buzzed beneath layers of polyester and faux-cotton, nestled underneath my right ear, stirring me from a dream that fled from memory as quickly as my eyes opened to stare at the water-stained white ceiling above me. I blinked the last bit of sleep from my eyes, and my phone buzzed loudly again. I turned over, groped blindly beneath the gutted innards of the old pillow, and dug around that white fluff until my hand found purchase against the cracked case. I pulled it free and held it above my face.
"Sean." The contact name read. The green phone symbol hopped up and down as it vibrated again. My younger brother.
I pressed my thumb against the glass and slid up: the raised surfaces of the small cracks scraping against my thumb. I pressed the speaker button.
"Yeah?" I managed to sputter out through the weariness.
The sun shot a shaft of white light through a small crack between the blackout curtain, hung by a row of thumbtacks over the windowsill.
"Are you just waking up?" Sean asked, exasperated.
"What are you even doing with your life, James?" Andrew— my other brother's voice came through as well.
"I was working until two in the morning," I said with a yawn.
I pushed myself up and sat on the edge of my bed: the old, gray vinyl flooring shifting slightly as I set my feet down upon it.
"What's going on?" I said.
"We were discussing things, James."
I hesitated for one moment.
"About what?" I managed to push out.
"You know."
I did.
"Do we have to do this now?" I asked.
"It's almost been a year, James," Sean responded.
"I know...just…."
I sighed. I knew. My father was currently languishing in a coma in a city away. A year ago, both he and my mother were hit by a drunk driver when they were out for a walk. The drunk driver fled the scene, and my mother managed to make it to the sidewalk. My father, however, was not so lucky. He was hit by several cars before my mother's screaming caused someone to pull over and drag my dad out of the street. He clung on to life then, and we had all thought he deserved the chance to continue the fight. My mother was currently paralyzed from the waist down, and the drunk driver was released on his own recognizance and fled to his home in Mexico, last I heard.
"Just what? How much longer should we allow him to suffer for?" Andrew said.
"He'd want to fight!"
"And he has been!" Sean said. "But we can't afford it anymore."
Between the three of us, we had to raise 15,000 dollars a month for both him and my mother's care. It took just about all of my money, and most of theirs as well, to keep my father's heart beating and his lungs pumping, and my mother off the street.
"What about mom?"
"Dad's care alone costs $9,000 a month. James, I'm having another kid. I can't afford it. We're barely scraping by as is."
"Do you really think Dad would want machines pumping his lungs for him, James?"
"He's going to come out," I said.
"No, he isn't," Sean shot back. "You need to come to terms with that, James."
I gritted my teeth.
"One more month," I said.
I wouldn't be able to handle it right now.
"James."
"Please…I'll pay for the next month, too."
"How?" Andrew said — his voice rumbling like a growl, "You're a janitor, James."
"I know...I know I'll sell the house."
"Don't you dare," Andrew said. "That's our childhood home."
"What does it matter if dad's not here?"
"James…" Sean sighed. "You're being childish."
"So? I don't care. I won't let Dad die."
Both of them went silent. I heard the tick-tacking of texting between the two. I tapped my foot against the ground and tapped my fingers across my thighs. Minutes passed in that aching silence. I tried to speak — an occasional, 'hello?' Or 'Andrew,' but nothing came. Until, at last, Sean spoke.
"Fine. We'll pay for one more month." Andrew said.
"One more month. But after that, if you can't pay, we're going through with it." Sean added in.
I breathed out a stream of air that I held in my lungs.
"Thank you…"
They hung up without saying anything else, and I let the phone fall to the ground. The hollow floor rang like a bell as I grabbed handfuls of my hair by my ears and pressed my eyes into my palms. I had no plans to pay. There was no way I could pay. If I sold the old trailer that my brothers and I grew up in, I would be homeless, and even if he did wake up, he would have nowhere to live. My brothers wouldn't let him live with them, even after he lost his job and we were forced to move back into this rundown thing.
I reached down and picked up my phone from the floor and carried it in my palm as I pushed myself off the sagging mattress with a disgruntled groan. A single shaft of white light bled in through a space between the two blackout curtains, hung on the faux-wood panel wall by four thumbtacks. I followed that sliver of light to the door and turned the handle, stopping as I did so to take a breath. Every day, I fought the urge to give in to despair and allow my father to be taken away by the looming specter of death. Every day, I had to fight to keep the flickering of hope alive within my soul. Hope was hard, and today, already, was testing that fragile thing. To hope was a hard thing. How easy it would be just to let it go.
Each step I took, I tested on tiptoe: feeling the floor beneath me so that I was sure it wouldn't give before putting my full weight onto it. I paused in the hall. To my left, there were two rooms: one, which once housed the laundry room, and had been used for storage for the holidays, now had holes bored through the tiled floors. Rot. Beside it was the room my brothers and I shared at one point. Mold clung to the dark places in the corners of the room. Rot.
The hall stretched to join the living room and the connecting kitchen. Once, we would come together during the day and watch television, or open gifts during the holidays. Once the smell of cooked meals wafted in from the kitchen, but now all there was was the stench of mildew. Rot. The living room now leaned a bit as the rusted jacks began to sag and give. Rot. This whole trailer was a monument to Rot.
Like this, I made my way across the single-wide trailer to the restroom. Dim, yellow light flooded the dark, vinyl-tiled room. Things skittered in the dark that I didn't even want to think about. No matter how many traps I laid out, there always seemed to be more: slipping in through the cracks in the floor and wall.
My eyes snapped to the dirty, water-spotted mirror, and I balked at what I saw there. Coarse, brown hair hung on my face like an infirm lion's mane. All the best, as the hair from the very top of my head seemed to have found its way there. Dark circles hung under my blue eyes, and my gut hung over the hem of my pajama pants. I sighed, rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and stepped over to the toilet. After I was finished, I stripped and set my clothes on the back of the toilet, and stepped into the shower.
The floor of the shower had rotted out long ago — leaving a large, shrapnel-filled hole in the middle where the drain ought to be. As such, I had to stand with my legs apart, letting the cold water roll over me. I couldn't afford the gas bill this month. After my shower, I dried myself off with the old towel that hung on the rack and ate a can of cold soup. The day passed as I read through one of the books I had bought at the thrift store the other day: the Book of Abramelin. As of late, I had delved deeper and deeper into the occult. If the rational world was unable to help him, then I would delve into the irrational.
The table I read at — a simple thing that I bought for a five-dollar bill at a yard sale, had deep etches of ancient SATOR squares, gouged into the wood: filled in by dust and grime. Wax discs from old candles stood in solemnity in the corners: crumbling towers that once flickered, now wickless. Pentagrams, Hexagrams, whispers of tetragrammatons, and the faded ghosts of battered barricades formed of salt sat in the center. Interconnected sephiroth roughly hewn in the oak; their orbs sat still and inert like rotting fruit. All my failures lay bare, etched into the wood for eternity.
A stack of books sat crooked and covered in layers of dust and cobwebs on a nearby shelf, just out of reach. Each page was scrawled with pen, tarnished and stained with bright, yellow highlighters, and torn at the edges. I took in and drank anything I could find: western occultism, eastern mysticism. The Quran, the Tao, and the Bible sat next to one another within that heap.
I tapped the short-bladed athame to my thigh: the rusted, dulled point catching within the polyester layers, and thumbed the beads of a rosary — the old elastic holding it together barely holding: and whispered silent prayers to Mary, Saint Jude, and the Devil in equal measure. This continued until 4 in the afternoon, when I had to get ready for work. I set the book down: held its place open with blade and beads, and rubbed the strain from my eyes.
I tiptoed down the rotted steps and onto the pocked earth, where our dog, long ago, had dug in the earth, scarring it forever. She was buried in the back. I stepped out into the setting, evening sun. I popped the hood of my old car and filled the radiator's tank with water so it wouldn't overheat by the time I got to work. A moment later, I pulled out and puttered down the road, turning on the highway. The orange trees beside me lay dead and dormant: waiting for spring's kiss to awaken them from their frosty slumber.
The engine roared like a hungry lion as I pushed it to its limits. By the time I made it to work, I was at an Indian casino at the edge of my town. I sat in my car, pressing my forehead against the rubber rim of the steering wheel.
"Deep breaths, James," I muttered to myself, as I quashed the despair choking at my heart to get ready for my shift.