Jacob gripped the toilet with both hands as he put his face over the bowl and heaved up greenish, yellow bile from his stomach. The acrid smell of all the puke that he never flushed made his eyes tear and caused him to heave harder.
He pushed himself up from the white porcelain bowl and staggered back into the room.
A picture of a pretty high school girl in a cheerleaders’ outfit hung on the wall above his bed. Her long, flowing blond hair touched her shoulders and appeared to be in disarray. The moment captured as a gust of wind blew it from its perfect shape.
He crashed to the floor and then crawled over to his bed. He clawed his way up, grasped the sheet and pulled himself into the bed, which was inclined. He gasped for air as he laid down. He wheezed. He pulled a piece of his hair out of his eyes. He didn’t have much hair left.
Jacob thought back to better times. Being only seventeen, he hadn’t been here too long. He remembered launching 40 yard touchdown passes to receivers down field as crowds in the stands roared. He was every girl’s dream. Everyday a new girl would send him a love note. They’d slip them through the crack in his locker. He’d find it later and smile. Sometimes they’d pass him one in class. It was nice to be desired. He hadn’t even received a visit since he came to this place.
“Jacob, it’s time for your shot.”
“I don’t want it.”
“You need it.”
“Why don’t you let me die already?”
The nun, dressed in gray, just smiled, walked over, pulled up his sleeve and stuck the needle into to his bony upper arm and pushed down the plunger. Temporary relief is what morphine offers.
“Get the fuck outta here.”
He couldn’t help the way he felt. He focused on the past but the present he couldn’t escape. The leukemia weaved its way through his body. It infected every white cell. Time was lost. Hope was gone. Death was near.
At the nurse’s station, or, more correctly, the nun’s station, the two Sisters looked at each other, each frowning.
“Sister Mary maybe you should give him what he wants. And tell the doctor to cease the treatments.”
Sister Mary walked to the end of the hall, opened the door and held her frock up with her left hand and glided her other hand over the rail as she stepped down the stairs until she came to the basement where a prayer vigil was set up with a bunch of candles in red glass holders. She lit one and then kneeled down before the large wooden crucifix and said the Our Father.
Jacob tilted his head as the door opened to his hospice room.
“Who the hell are you?”
“I am Sister Patricia. I came to talk.”
“Go find somebody who gives a fuck, what did I miss a fucking meeting or something? I’m supposed to gush out all my feelings and everything is gonna be hunky doory, huh? ” he coughed out, trying to make it sound louder.
She didn’t listen and sat down on the bed and put her hand on Jacob’s bony leg. He was too weak to try and swat it away. She told him how God and medicine could cure him. She told him to stay positive. She told him to pray. Jacob spit on her. She wiped it off her face and then rubbed it on a napkin she pulled out from a hidden pocket in her frock. Sister Patricia laid her other hand on Jacob’s forehead and said a prayer, a prayer for the dying.
Jacob wasn’t even Catholic; he was Jewish. The reason his parents never visited him was because they lived in the slums of Tel Aviv and spent all their shekels to send Jacob to America where suicide bombers didn’t blow up buses, where he could put his talents as a football player to the test, where he could thrive. He told the nuns that his parents died in a suicide bombing on a bus in 2001 because he didn’t want them to see him die. He wished Alexis, the cheerleader in the picture would visit, but he never got so much as a letter. After he was diagnosed and went to the hospital she broke of all contact. Last time he heard from anybody was his history teacher who called one day, and, who not being able to lie, told him that Alexis was going to the prom with his best friend, the wide receiver, Mark.
Jacob lived on the outskirts of town in a trailer that his parents had paid for. The reason he ended up in the hospice was because he had no health insurance and it was the only place that would take him in.
“Jacob, I can help you. I can love you. God is love”
“Love me? You’re a fucking nun and I'm a self-hating Jew. That and I’m fucking dying if you hadn’t noticed, bitch. What the fuck, seriously,” he said, coughing as he spit the last word out of his mouth
“God can heal all wounds, even the deepest ones that seem as if they will scar you forever.”
“There is no God.”
Sister Patricia started caressing his thigh, saying how she never even wanted to be a nun, that her parents forced her into it and that she was a virgin.
Her hair peaked out of her headdress; a light blond wisp tickled her cheek. Her skin was flawless and her perky breasts pushed out the front of her frock like none of the other old nurse breasts could She didn’t look a day over 20.
“I have to go now Jacob. I’ll visit you tomorrow night.”
Jacob rarely slept; he stared at the ceiling at night. The touch of Sister Patricia’s hand on his thigh send shivers down his spine as he thought of it. He smiled. He hadn’t smiled since he came to this place. He fell asleep.
“Morning, Jacob,” Sister Mary said, strolling in and opening the blinds. “It’s time to check your vitals.”
Jacob didn’t say a word as she strolled over to him like the old nun that she was and wrapped the cuff around his upper arm and pumped the little air bulb until the cuff tightened to capacity.
“Very good Jacob. You seem to be doing better. Your face even has a little color. But, it’s time for you IV and then the morphine.”
A doctor in a green scrub wearing a mask rushed in, rolling an IV filled with chemo—specifically, a high dose interferon. He told the nun to prep the vein for the injection. Then after she wiped his arm with anesthetic, patted it dry and touched Jacob’s forehead again, the doctor came over and inserted the larger needle into his vein and watched as the blood started to filter through the hole and then he pressed the on button and the chemo swam into his bloodstream like thousands of little submarines all armed to teeth with one mission: kill. Kill the cancer. Kill everything. Try not to kill the patient. It happens sometimes. Sometimes they do it themselves when the pain becomes too much to bear and the morphine steps its magical, yet deceptive, healing abilities.
After all the last drop of that deadly fluid entered his blood, the nun gave Jacob another shot in the arm.
Jacob looked up and waited for the rush as the morphine send waves of pleasure through his body. The tsunami of ecstasy started at his heart and then washed up on every cell on his body, caressing him like the warm waters of the Atlantic off the coast of Florida in August. He squinted his eyes and saw the room start to dance, as the nun closed the door to give the shot to the next patient.
As the door closed, it creaked back open as Jacob stared out the window. Sister Patricia sauntered into the room, grazing her fingertips against the wall until she put her hand on Jacob’s head. “Your fever’s gone. You look better.”
“Well if it isn’t the 20 year old virgin nun.”
“Shush, Jacob. I’m only here to help you.”
“Well then show me some mercy, fuck.”
They talked about the sunny day first and the Sister even offered to wheel Jacob out to the garden outside of the hospice that resembled some scene from an Amazon jungle: palm trees and sycamores, frogs leaping out of ponds, fish swimming, trained tropical birds fluttering their wings. But Jacob didn’t feel much like moving he told her and then he grabbed a piece of her gray frock.
“Kinda rough fabric, looked softer.”
“It does get hot.”
Jacob lapsed in and out of consciousness. His head nodded. His aches left. He felt good. He was originally on Oxycontins, but in his condition they just didn’t do the trick. Most of the nuns didn’t like him. Most patients tended to be sullen but jovial in a way. Jacob was angry—at God, at his ex, at the world for even being born. “Oh God, why are you doing this to me,” he’d cry out at night silently so no one would here. He kept thinking back. And that was his problem. All past. No present. No future.
When the nuns came in he unleashed his fury at them. He’d throw whatever he could get his hands on—spoons, forks, flowers if anyone sent them, which they didn’t. In a world full of people, in a world he thought was happy, in a world that appeared so nice, he felt hated and he hated himself for allowing the bitter poison of animosity to sicken his soul the way the leukemia sickened his blood.
“You’re really pretty. Why don’t you get out of the hell out of here.”
“It’s where I belong.”
“You should live. This isn’t living watching the dying. People like me. People filled with bitterness. People who hate everyone.”
Sister Patricia simply laid her hand on his chest and rubbed it. Jacob grabbed he r hand and held it. The Sister didn’t pull away. Then Jacob moved it down farther and farther until it was right on his crotch which attempted to harden and ever so slowly it did. She glanced down. He pulled her on top of his bony body as she languidly fell all over him, straddling his legs her crotch pushed up against his.
Back when Jacob was in school he had the chance to be with girls, but never really got anywhere. A touch here. A kiss there. A brush against a perky breast there. But nothing intimate. He’d always figured time was on his side, that he’d overcome his shyness. What a joke God played on him—for time slips away fast and you cannot recreate moments passes you can only create future ones. And that’s what he realized as she bucked against him, riding him. It’s what he realized when he threw her over and mounted her. It’s what he realized when he wanted that final cigarette. When he awoke she was gone. But she’d come back.
Sister Mary walked in the door and saw Jacob smiling.
“You look better.”
“I feel it.”
“Any pain?”
“A little. But I’m feeling positive like you told me; maybe I’ll make it after all. Maybe I can beat this.”
“Well I have your shot.”
“How come Sister Patricia doesn’t give it to me?”
“Excuse me, Jacob.”
“Sister Patricia, I want her to be the person who gives me the shot.”
“Jacob, you must be having some sort of reaction to the morphine. No Sister Patricia ever worked here and no one by that name does now.”
“She was twenty. Blond hair. Pretty.”
“Maybe we shouldn’t give you the shot.”
The blood drained from Jacob’s face like so many memories that need to be forgotten and his eyes filled with tears that streamed down his face. He collapsed. The heart monitor beeped and then flatlined. Code blue. Code blue.
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