Wake Up Calls

By Ben Leib

“Wake up.  Wake up.”  My stepmother was standing at my bed, yanking my foot back and forth.  “What drugs did you guys do last night?”  She seemed more afraid than angry.

“Nothing, we didn’t get into any trouble last night.”  I’d grown so accustomed to lying that I could do it in my sleep.

“You sure?” Joanne asked, “because Hector’s acting strange.”

“Yeah, nothing.”

“Then it’s got to be his blood sugar.”  Hector was diabetic.  We’d been best friends for long enough that I’d developed a sense of his highs and lows, even at times when he himself was too hazy to recognize the need to check his blood sugar.  When Hector spaced out, when he got that lazy eyed, blind stare, I knew that he was in trouble.

“He took his insulin last night,” I told Joanne.  “He took his Lenti, so his blood sugar shouldn’t be up.”  I was rushing out of my bed at this point.  Joanne bustled me into the living room in my boxer shorts.

“Did you guys eat much before bed?”

“No, not really.”

“Then he’s having a low,” Joanne said.  “Just go in there and see what’s going on.”

My little brother looked scared as we rushed passed him.  “Hector’s not making sense,” he said.

I’d talked Hector down from a lot of things, and he had done the same for me: a bad drunk, a bad trip, a moment of fury.  And I’d talked Hector out of sugar induced stupors, so I figured that I would be able to get him up, get him moving, get some sucrose into him.  “Hector,” I called as I approached the couch, “Hector, get up dude.”

“Get him to drink some orange juice,” Joanne yelled to me from the refrigerator.

Hector blabbered, his eyes open half mast, as he laid there on the couch, stubbornly immobile.  “Get the fuck off the couch, we gotta get some juice in ya,” I yelled at him, as I tugged his arm, finally coercing him to rise, to follow me toward the kitchen.  Monosyllabic grunts fell from his lips like he was talking in tongues.  Joanne had set the glass of juice on the kitchen counter, and I took my eyes off of Hector for just one moment, just long enough to grab that beverage.  When I turned back to him, he looked different.  His naturally tan, Latino flesh had paled to a cadaverous gray.  His purple lips swelled.  His eyes were wide, stared off into nothing with a look of terror, as if the specter of life’s false promise had materialized for him alone.

Hector didn’t so much fall, he didn’t so much collapse, as he propelled himself spasmodically into my grandparents’ credenza.  His shirtless body dragged itself down the sharp lip of that wooden cabinet, and then slumped, bleeding, onto the carpet, where he began to seizure.  I jumped on him.  His eyes were veined, bloodshot whites, irises having rolled up into the sockets.  His teeth clamped sharply on his black tongue.  It took both hands to pry his jaws open, and, without forethought, I shoved my thumb into that bear trap.  The strength of his seizure, the intense rigidity, was experienced for me through the strength of his jaws on my finger. 

“Get me a wooden spoon,” I screamed to my brother.   He did as requested, and I jammed it between Hector’s teeth before he got the chance to bite my thumb off.

“Give him some juice,” Joanne instructed as she handed me the glass.  I slowly poured orange juice through the narrow slot that the wooden spoon allowed between Hector’s lips.  Moment by moment, his spasms subsided.  The cadaverous zombie transformed once again, as Hyde receding back into Jekyll.  Then he was just Hector again, lying there, unconscious, on my grandparents’ carpet.  As the adrenaline dwindled, I crashed.  If I’d been asked at that time in my life, I would have anticipated an early demise.  I was positive, in fact, that I wouldn’t live to see my thirtieth year.  And now, having caught what I interpreted as a glimpse of death, I was terrified.