The Redemption of Marvin Fuster by Patrick Sean Lee (best affordable ebook reader TXT) 📕

She scribbled on her chart again as he spoke.

“Hmm. I’m sorry. When the time comes, we’ll see about releasing you to a shelter.”

“I ain’t homeless. That’s my home, and I’m comf-terble and happy there.”

“We’re sure you are. It isn’t our place to say anything about that, but we’re sure you’ll want to arrange to go someplace less exposed…social services can help you there. You’ll need someplace clean to recuperate. We’re just happy you’re awake finally.”

With that she turned and began walking out of the curtained-off area of the room.

“It’s clean enough there! YOU go to a goddam’ shelter—all of ya’—just for one night! You’ll see…” He heard the door swish open and the squeak of her shoes on the polished tile.

“You’ll see,” he mumbled. “You’ll see.”

The morning light flooding through the windows across the room rippled, darkened slightly, quickly, and then grew bright once again. Marvin brought his eyes to bear on it and thought he saw the hazy outline of a figure moving, and the distinct shimmer of what looked like wings before the vision dissipated. He continued to stare for several moments, waiting for something further, listening for any sound. Nothing, only the occasional clattering and squeaking of heels in the hall outside the room.

                                     ***

“How much you want for it?”

The squat, balding man with a full butcher’s apron covering his gray suit eyed Marvin, not warily exactly, but carefully. They stood at the edge of the dock behind the meat packing plant, near to the spot where several boards covering its face had been roughly removed.

“I won’t let it out for less than two thousand a month,” he said at length.

“Hah! You’re nuts! I can lease a goddam’ penthouse for that.”

“I can see you haven’t been in the market for quite a while, Mr…Mr…”

“Fuster. With an F, as in Fuck you.” He instantly regretted having spit that out.  It could only be a deal breaker. “Tell you what I’m gonna’ do. I’ll give you a hundred-fifty a month for this rat hole. That’s my best and only offer.”

“There are no rats here. Look. Look for yourself.”  He bent down, a glint of afternoon sunlight catching hold of his scalp making it look like an oversized cue ball aproned with black fuzz. “Clean as a hospital operating room. No rats.”

Marvin bent down and peered in.

                                     ***

“How are you this afternoon, Mister Fuster?” The voice was softer than the one he’d just heard. The one belonging to the nurse who wanted to stick him in a homeless shelter a moment ago, and it belonged to only one person. Marvin opened his eyes. She was short, with a stunning figure disguised poorly beneath her white lab coat.  The doctor stood at the side of his bed, stethoscope at the ready.

“Okay, I guess.”

After blinding him with her tiny flashlight for several seconds, she pulled the sheet down to his waist and then undid his hospital gown. “All right then, take a deep breath. Hold it, and then exhale slowly,” she said firmly.

He did as he was instructed. The faint odor of her perfumed hair falling close to his nose, jumbled up though it was with the antiseptic smell of her hands, caused him to relax and try as best he could to expand his chest to the size of an Olympic swimming pool. Marvin was able to fill his lungs to the size of a water glass. A sharp pain struck his head as he inhaled, making him wince, and the doctor noticed immediately.

“Okay?”

“No. Yes.” His lungs deflated when he spoke, garbling the indecisive answer.

The flashlight reappeared. He closed his eyes, weary of being blinded.

“Open.”

“Do ya’ have to keep doin’ that?”

“Yes,” she answered. “I need to look. Open, please.” She laid a hand on his temple, and her fragrant hair brushed his cheek.  He opened his eyes and took another deep, painful breath.

“Take yer time, doc.” The light flashed back and forth.

“Count to ten for me, please.”

“What for?”

“Just count.”

“Okay. One. Two…four, five, six, seven…nine, ten.” 

She snapped the flashlight off and left him without a word to scribble something onto the chart she’d brought with her.

“I never was any good at numbers. Lemme’ try again. I’ll betcha’ I can get all the way to a hundred this time.”

The doctor didn’t bother to answer as she scribbled away, her back to him. He watched her, wondering whether or not she was married—wondering why he would wonder that. Suddenly he saw the dimming and then brightening once again at the far end of the room, a few feet in front of her, and the faint outline of wingtips.

“Holy smoke! Ya’ se that?”

She wheeled around at his exclamation. “See what?”

“Somebody else is in here! Somebody with wings! Dintja’ see it? The light an’ them wings? Ya’ musta’! It was right in front of ya’!”

She eyed him for a second before turning quickly to scan the area behind her, then turned to face her patient once again.

“Wings?” 

“Yeah! Christ Almighty! Ya’ missed it! It was there, I swear it…I saw that same thing this morning. Jesus Jones, what’s goin’ on?”

The doctor slipped her pen into the clip of her chart and walked to his bedside again. She squinted at him, turning her head sideways a bit, as if the valley on the left side of his nose was what needed to be observed.

“Mr. Fuster,” she said at last, “you’ve suffered a brain contusion, which means…”

“I know what it means. And a basilar fracture. I know all that. That don’t mean my eyes are playin’ tricks on me. I saw it!”

“It isn’t your eyes that are playing tricks on you. It’s your damaged brain. Your eyes are dilated…not badly, but enough. These distortions of vision are quite normal for someone who has…”

“That weren’t no distortion!”

“Certainly. Be that as it may, they’ll pass in time as your brain begins to heal itself. Now, I want you to try and get some rest.  I’ll check in on you a little later. Try counting to a hundred after I leave.” She smiled and touched his bare arm gently before turning to leave.

“I saw it. I did.”

“Rest now, Mister Fuster. I’ll return a little later.”

“When do I get outta’ here?”

“In good time,” he heard her answer from beyond the curtain.

Marvin waited, glancing back and forth from the space at the end of the curtain to the bank of windows, positive that the doctor was as beautiful and desirable as he had seen her; equally positive that something else was in the room watching him, and that it would reappear. Neither image a trick of the mind.

“I ain’t nuts. I ain’t nuts. I ain’t nuts.”

And yet, he questioned that pronouncement over the ensuing days. The shadowy form continued its visitation, more often than the beautiful doctor. Where she spoke and listened to him try to describe it in inadequate words, the specter wandered in and out, silent. Always with the wings that sometimes moved like the shadow they were attached to, sometimes drawn closed and tucked tightly to its back.

Finally, at the end of Marvin’s fifth day, just when he was getting used to being insane, the creature approached his side in the darkness and whispered to him in a voice that woke him and brought chills to his soul.

 Amy Alionello woke when the little Mickey Mouse alarm clock on the nightstand beside her bed sprang to life, early that morning, while Marvin Fuster listened in a fog of disbelief to an angel in his room at Denver General Hospital. She threw her arm out from beneath the covers, found the button at the top of Mickey’s head, and pushed it down. It was six o’clock and a new day had begun. She rolled over, pulling the covers back over her bare shoulders, and lay quiet for a moment as the tailings of sleep drifted away.

The sun had poked over the horizon half an hour ago and illuminated the bedroom in a cool, dim glow, forcing soft shadows beneath all of the objects along its path. Atop the covers at the foot of the bed, her old friend, Mr. Pudge, sat half-upright and stared blankly at her with his two black glass-bead eyes. Had he not had the sturdy footboard at his back he would have long ago become a casualty of the night and wound up on his belly on the woven rug covering the polished wood floor. She raised her head slightly and saw him resting in his bent position.

“Good morning, Pudge. See anything unusual in here while I slept last night?” Reaching down, she grabbed the stuffed bear that her father had given to her long ago when she was just a little girl back in Chicago, and curled up with him again to enjoy a last moment of warmth before rising to begin the day.

Pudge had not seen a thing, of course, but a visitor had been there all the same, watching Amy throughout the night. He had scoured the mail sitting in neat stacks on her small desk in the living room, made note of the statuary she had gathered over the past two years after she had moved into the charming old building on Capitol Hill. He looked with interest at the framed photos of her and her family back home. An album of who this woman was beginning to emerge.

Pushing the light blanket to one side, she climbed out of bed and grabbed her robe from the chair-back a few feet away near the window. She pulled it casually around her bare shoulders and pushed the curtains aside to peek out at the new morning light, the lushly-leaved trees across the street, and the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains in the distance.

“June is the finest month in this city,” she remarked under breath. “I love you, Denver, all of you. You’re everything I imagine Heaven itself to be…” She let the curtains fall back and turned to leave the bedroom for the bath. “Everything except for that devil I work for.”

She had rented the apartment in a 70-year-old building a few months after John Sampson had hired her three years ago, but it was nothing at all like the place he had imagined in his fantasies. Hers had one bedroom, a comfortable old bath with the original ball and claw tub, fine, tall windows in every room, and much too much woodwork gracing it to suit John Sampson’s modern tastes. Had he seen it. The floors were hardwood, and creaked along the hallway leading from the bedroom at the front of the building to the entryway at the center of the small complex. She’d never minded that, though—in her eyes it simply added another dimension to her home’s character. She had immediately fallen in love with the place when she first had seen it, and scavenged enough furniture and knickknacks to fill all of its nooks and crannies to her liking after having signed the lease. It grew dearer and dearer to her with every passing day.

Rising