Vague Pains

By Zachary Lemon

On the outskirts of Detroit, Meadowview Hospital means different things different people: a place to work, a place to learn, and a place to fear. Follow their intersecting narratives as Tess, Henry, and Thomas, find themselves traversing each other's dreams and struggles. Afterward, they will never be the same.

In his intriguing debut novel, Zachary Lemon masterfully crafts an introspective story which will lead you to question your own daily contradictions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781543905786

Book preview

One

If you think about it, big beautiful flowers only get that way by choking off their neighbors’ share of light. The real courage is in choosing to shrink back. I want to wither without trying to be seen.

Henry Beale’s pen was resting on the last period, his eyes brushing over his writing, when the nurse walked in with an IV bag. He rested a hand over the page to cover the words—not that she would have cared. Henry imagined her weary voice saying, It’s nothing I haven’t seen before, as if his hospital gown had fallen open.

The nurse flashed a professional smile and explained that the doctors had ordered fluids for him. Henry gritted his teeth but said nothing as she turned to program the IV pump. Of course the intern would order a saline drip for him even though he didn’t need it.

The nurse connected the tubing and left.

Henry tried to ignore the cold wave spreading up his arm, and reread his words:

I want to wither without trying to be seen.

Then why write it down, idiot?

Realizing he had spoken, Henry froze and listened for a reaction from his roommate. Behind the dividing curtain, rattling breaths continued their steady rhythm, like waves scraping an old boat against its dock.

Slowly and methodically he crossed out each word, pressing hard and knowing he would leave indentations on the next several pages.

Henry was twenty-six, but he had already lost count of the number of times he had been in the hospital. Without fail, the doctors ordered IV fluids—not for any particular reason—it was just something that was done in hospitals. The first time, when he had felt the chill, he had reached up to touch the bag, certain it had just come out of a refrigerator. He had been surprised to find the it was room temperature, but after a few seconds he realized this still made it far colder than the body’s ninety-eight-point-six degrees. An inconsequential mystery solved. From experience he knew having his nurse ask the intern to stop the fluids would be a waste of time: their doctor’s identity was too new and fragile to allow a change of mind. Henry would have to accept this useless umbilical cord, giving him nothing. It was just one of the many things he had learned, like the importance of having a short extension cable so his phone charger could reach the bed, and how to loop the cord around the handrail in a loose knot so the phone would stay in reach. His nurse had half smiled at that. Henry shivered, pulled up his thin hospital blanket, and thought back.

There was no name for his condition, but it seemed that every few months Henry would end up in the hospital with something wrong. A hundred years ago he probably wouldn’t have survived to adolescence, and a hundred years in the future scientists would be able to interrupt the mismatched puzzle pieces of sperm and egg that had generated his sputtering cells. He imagined a tiny pair of futuristic tweezers nudging them apart, and another, perfect combination uniting to make a less faulty human being. He had been born at the exact time in human history when he would be destined to keep getting patched up and keep falling apart again. This time, the white part of his eyes had turned yellow, and he had a dull pain in his gut. The doctors had said it was liver problems—no idea why, of course.

Henry looked up to see a tray of food on his bedside table and an aide disappearing out of sight. His mind belatedly registered that the man had told him to enjoy his dinner, but now it was too late to respond. In any case, he knew not to expect much, and he was right. Dry chicken. Wrinkled peas. Tasteless mashed potatoes. A little tin of orange juice was the highlight. At bigger, fancier hospitals the food was decent—maybe even restaurant-quality—but not at Meadowview. Really, Meadowview was lackluster in almost every way, but had the overwhelming advantage of being less than a mile from where he lived.

As he ate, Henry listened again for his neighbor. He sounded like he was in an even deeper sleep now, with long silences and sudden, sharp intakes of air. Henry had gotten the better side of the room, the far end with a window, instead of the side with an ever-open door to the hall. He would probably be in the hospital two or three days. At least, that was what the ER doctor had guessed.

Henry pushed his half-empty food tray to the far edge of the rolling table suspended above his lap and pulled out his spiral notebook again. He used the pages at the front of the book to write down things he had read and wanted to remember. Flipping the notebook over and starting from the back cover, he used the last pages to write down his own thoughts—but so far none of these thoughts had survived more than a few minutes before he had blotted them out.

Henry started flipping through the front pages. The first few dozen were filled with passages he’d carefully copied down from books he’d gotten three-for-a-dollar at Salvation Army, or audiobooks he could listen to for free on his library app. Sometimes he would pick books he had heard of, but usually he chose on impulse. This is how he found some of his favorites, like the Sufi epic poem The Conference of the Birds or Balzac’s bizarre novel The Magic Skin.

It was rare for him to blot out these quotations, but after flipping through a few pages he came to one of the few exceptions. Here had been the Buddhist passages he used to find so comforting. At first he had spent days absorbed in reading the Pali Canon, some of the oldest Buddhist works. Henry’s shaky health had long ago made him painfully aware of his own impermanence and suffering, but these ancient writings taught that they defined everyone else’s life too, whether they realized it or not. He had even had wondered if his pain made him a little more attuned to spiritual truth. Back then, reading through the dizzying complexity of the teachings, he had soon lost sight of the meaning of the words, but somehow it hadn’t bothered him. Strangely, this almost seemed to be the point. Reading those pages of swirling repetition was less about comprehending than about entering a state of reverie, where the intricate designs lost their focus and became a sea of tall grass he could get lost in.

Henry was just beginning to accept this comfort when he reached the passages offering serene assurances that any misery people experience is justice for the evil they had done in a previous life. Little kids with cancer? They had it coming. He felt betrayed, and his mind recoiled from the cruelty of the idea, which was as central to Buddhism as the quotations he had lovingly written in his notebook.

In time, Henry had an even more disturbing realization: a