Participants:
| Scene Title | Death or Sleep |
|---|---|
| Synopsis | It can always get worse. |
| Date | September 9, 2009 |
Beep
Hospitals strip away humanity from patients. The sterile white walls, tile floor and bleached bedding makes for a world painted in shades of nothing but parchment pale. Clothing is forsaken for backless gowns, machines beep and chirp in audible report of vitald and lifesigns, and overstressed hospital staff offers little in the way of personalized treatment.
Beep
Even members of the NYPD are treated no differently here, where saline drips and suboxone IVs offer relief and revitilization, a chance to take away the pain one last time while the body purges humiliation and relief in one sweaty, joint-aching minagerie of hallucinations, headaches and depression.
Beep
Staring up at the tiled ceiling overhead, the half-lidded eyesof Rebecca Nakano peer listlessly. In the late evening, with the sun having set, her hospital room looks more humble that dehumanizing. Blues have replaced whites, shadows cast by trees outside of her third floor room spread like dark veins across the ceiling, and the jaundiced yellow lights of street lamps behind them add strangely bruise-like hues to the ceiling and walls.
Beep
It's only that rythmic monitoring of her heart-rate that provides a measure of time, the ticking of a distant click is too far away to hear, and the lack of light has made it's surface too muted to read. Outside of her room, viewed through the slatted blinds drawn over one plate glass window, the shadow of an orderly drifts past the glass in slow procession down the hall.
Beep
Or maybe a nurse come to replenish her fluids or suboxone bag, or maybe it's the janitor cleaning up something stained to the hallway floor outside. But that slow twist of the shiny brushed metal handle to her door comes with a click-creak of the internal components, and the gradual parting of the door from the frame as it slides open to reveal a broad shadow lingering in the doorway.
Beep
"'Becca…" The deep, rough voice is at once familiar and unfamiliar, but thorugh the haze of detoxification, pain and tiredness it is hard to place the where and the when, save that the way the light from outside reflects off of his glasses seems familiar too.
Sleep.
She begged for it. Craved it. When the monsters came for her and stripped her of all that made her human, she screamed for it and it came. God or someone was listening and interceded on her behalf. The drug has been through her system, yet slowly wearing thin as she hears her name. Rebecca Nakano is unaware of where she is or how she got here. She has no clue that out in the waiting room, her mother sits, or paces, or cries while her father tries to comfort.
She stirs, eyes closed, as her name is spoken. She recognizes her name, that she's being address and yet her eyes seem to weigh tons as she tries to force them open.
To see who's there, saying her name.
Her voice is tired and scratchy from her screaming. Dry from lack of moisture.
"Who's there?"
She can feel the edges of nausea taunting her from the sidelines as she wets her lips with her tongue. Her thick tongue. It doesn't seem to help. Not one bit.
A weathered face steps into the light for a moment, sad and tired eyes behind large glasses. The heavy footsteps come with a dribbling sound, something wet and drizzling tracking across the tile floor, a drip-drip-drip spattering with each footfall. "'Becca," the voice implies, and as the shadowed figure steps into the light again, he's by her bedside, and the clarity of who is speaking to her finally comes more crystal clear. It's been a long time since Rebecca Nakano has seen the face of Richard Myron, but now that he's standing by her bedside, fingers wound around the railing, face half hidden in shadow, there's nothing relieving about his presence.
He's dead. He can't be here.
"'Becca, why'd… why'd you let them bury me?" His voice is weak, tired sounding, like an old man who's struggled far too long and far too hard. "Becca' I wasn't dead. Why— why you let them put me in the ground?"
No.
"You.. It wasn't me."
Her eyes become a little less heavy as she forces them to open, or at least she thinks she does. Perhaps she's dreaming.
She doesn't notice the tube attached to her arm as she leans over to her nightstand. The one that would be there if she were in her apartment. The one where her syringes of Refrain would be. But as she reaches out, there's no nightstand, no syringes.
"I.. saw you die. Didn't you die?" she asks, now unsure of her own reality. The lines between what has or has not happens starts to blue as she attempts to sit up, frustrated at not being able to reach what it is she craves.
The beeping on the monitor begins to increase its pace as she begins to exert a little energy trying to wake up from her drug induced sleep.
"They took me there and made me watch you die."
"You watched me die?" The voice from Myron is increasingly hostile, one weathered hand reaching out to brush across Rebecca's cheek. As he eases further into the light, there's a dark black stain on the front of his button-down shirt, a crusted and still ozzing bloody stain where a bullet punched thorugh his sternum and into his heart. "Why didn't you do anything, 'Becca? Why didn't you— why'd you let me die?"
Between the slatted blinds, other shadows are drawing closer to the windows of Rebecca's hospital room, stalking and shambling shadows given no form, but in the back of her mind the fear makes suggestions of who or what they are come slithering into focus. "'Becca."
Myron's voice comes with both hands clamping down on her shoulder, forcing her back against the metal surface of her hospital bed. His other hand reaches up, turning on the bright examination light overhead, reflecting off of the tray of sugrical tools. Now she can see the clock on the wall, reading twelve thirty like a slitted white eye staring down at her.
Those dark silhouettes are on the edges of the room now, standing by the rows of lockers, their naked and grayed forms pockmarked with metal sutures and gaping wounds. Some are little more than blackened bones standing upright, each with a tan colored paper tag hanging from their foot.
"You're sick, 'Becca…" Myron stares down at her in the bright light of the autopsy table, reaching out for a syringe with the surgical tools, one glowing a bright and cold blue color. "You need medicine."
Her heartrate increases as she screams. Throat raw from her previous bout of shrieking and it burns when she struggles against the grasp of him holding her down.
Her feet begin to push against the foot of her hospital bed as she tries to push away from him. "It wasn't me! It wasn't me!" She squeals loudly over and over again.
She tries to find his hands and push them away. Her eyes are wide open now, as those shadows start to take form. Those screams would be familiar to those out in the hallway, though they know that she is secured to the bed.
Unfortunately, Rebecca Nakano is not aware that she's strapped to the bed. Her arm that reached for the syringe, didn't. Her legs that tries to kick away, cannot. As that realization dawns on her, her screams become even louder.
"Get-away! Get-away!"
Over and over again.
Beep-Beep-Beep-Beep
The rapid-fire whine of the heartrate monitor screams out an angry warning as nurses burst into the hospital room. Thrashing around on the bed, her eyes wrenched shut and back arched, Rebecca Nakano's fitful screams echo in the room. Unaware of the trauma she is suffering inside of her mind, the hospital staff rushes to her side, barking out orders for sedatives and more restraint to keep her held down.
Beep-Beep-Beep-Beep
A male nurse struggles with her, pressing down on her shoulders to keep her in place as sedatives are injected into her, but it's only when another nurse flicks on the lights to the room that the male nurse holding her down sees something that makes his mouth open wide, eyes growing into a fearful and confused stare and brows rising. "She— " his eyes avert to her arms restrained to the bed, then back up to her throat.
Beep-Beep-Beep-Beep
Around Rebecca's neck, bruise-like marks blossom purple and blue over the column of her throat, with long finger-like marks along the sides, as if someone in the room had been trying to strangle her in her sleep. The two other nurses stare in wide-eyed horror as the sedatives go in, causing muscles to relax, thrashing to stop, but the bruise— the bruise is still there amidst the huffedo ut breaths of fearful words spilling from her lips.
Beep-Beep-Beep-Beep
"Call Doctor Inman— now!"