AFTERMATHS : THE SUBSEQUENT LIVES OF THE FABULOUS KILLJOYS

8.

8.
Gerard looks at the paperwork the nurse has returned to give, utterly speechless. His mouth is as dry as a desert, and as a natural reflex he absent-mindedly turns to lick his lips, wetting the barren surface with salivary support, which doesn't seem to help but rather attenuate. His lips are beginning to crack at the fronts, which reminds Gerard vividly and scaringly of brittle, volatile earth typical of the highlands and deserts, and his tongue tastes blood, stringent even, and cringes. Is he really so stressed out, so helpless that he begins to age rapidly?

Blood on your sweet, sweet lips. Vampires.

(Shut up. Not now.)

Gerard can feel a headache closing in on him anytime soon, and even though he perfectly comprehends that tearing up right now would only serve as a catharsis, anything but a sign of weakness, but he still, begrudgingly, choke back the tears. All that "stay strong", "it will be okay" crap, that's bullshit. Tearing up, or releasing the gunk, as Mikey would say, is something of Gerard's forte. But today, during this moment in time, he finds himself unable, even disabled of the ability to just let it loose. To just cry out the piled-up gunk.

If Mikey doesn't wake up in three years, we will have to move him to a new hospital, Gerard rephrases the nurses' words in his mind, and laughs depressedly at the thought. Hooked onto  new machinery, given sponge baths from new nurses, monitored unfalteringly, and nonchalantly, by aging doctors. But there's a more fail-safe alternative, a more cost-effective one. That is, if you want to call all the miracles God, or some holy deity that reigns over us all, weaves upon us once in awhile, a load of bullcrap, then your way out is as easy as pie.

Sign the paperwork, terminate every hope that is clinging on your younger brother ever recovering, annul the days that you have spent with each other, and pull the plug. All the machinery will stop, Mikey's stomach will stop its rhythmic rising and falling, and all the troubles involving the money, the time, the efforts, will be nothing more than a disposed burden, a bullet that manages to miss the target, but leaves as deep and tragic a scar as any other.

"Hobson's choice." - whispers the sound that has taken residence inside the depths of Gerard's mind, emerging only with words of wisdom.

(SHUT UP!!!!!)

Gerard turns his eyes to Mikey, as if wanting his opinion, as if waiting for an answer, any answer, but Mikey returns him only a hackneyed, stolid look that infuriates Gerard even more. Why did you have to do this, Mikey? Why were you drinking and driving?

"Was it because you were struggling with the disbandment?"

(Like I am?) - His mind playfully added, and Gerard feels his face heating up, getting lava-red, and  the tears still can't come out, as if he was struggling with impotence.

Gerard holds out his right hand and clasp it over Mikey's, which is lukewarm, and squeezes it, maybe a tad too hard. Mikey's countenance remains stoic.

"Mikey."

The words that come out of Gerard's mouth are as barren and dry as his lips, which flabbergasted Gerard. His voice is like a croak, a frog's croak, heinous and unappealing.

"Mikey." - He repeats the name like a mantra, squeezing his younger brother's hand even tighter.

"Tell me what to do with you, Mikey-boy."

And at last the tears begin to roll, wetting the reddening, overheated skin of his face like a sudden downpour after a year without rain.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"Uncle Fronk".
"Frank, honey." - says Lindsey, in a defensively courteous manner. Her voice is dripping with bewilderment and worry, Frank can easily tell. She has been licking her lips innumerable occasions since they set foot in the hospital's jam-packed cafeteria, despite having ordered a steaming cup of joe that now lies lukewarm, tepid and marooned on the further side of the table. Somehow that gesture reminds Frank of someone he knows, yet he can't quite put his finger on it. Lindsey is also biting her nails, not the kind of biting that comes subconsciously, but deliberately. Frank feels as if she were hungry enough to devour her own hands, for that matter. Lindsey doesn't seem to have mustered up enough courage to strike up a conversation with Frank and ask him why he's here, why he's accompanying Gerard to the hospital with Gerard's nose in raggedy tatters and why is he back all of a sudden. Lindsey has had quite a subdued relationship with Frank even when My Chemical Romance still exists, she would occasionally turn out at their concerts, entrusted upon to visit the band backstage and hug her sweaty, mascara-smeared husband and, also occasionally, greet and meet his bandmates. Mikey is no stranger, of course, but Frank and Ray are different. Ray is more open and a real savior when it comes to ice-breakers, but Frank has always been different. Different in a bewildering, amusing way, not in an annoying, stuck-up manner. He's more introverted and, ironically, frank. He usually cuts right to the chase and skips all the extraneous crap that, as a rule, goes along with the issue at hand, and sometimes people don't want to cut to their chases. Sometimes the long-drawn-out chitchat is what cuts the ice the deepest.

Frank is not that kind of guy. He rarely speaks, but when he does he does it with fewer protracted spells.

And also, Frank's overdone makeup and animalistic aura always frighten Lindsey. He's a guitarist of a rock band after all, but Frank's vanity touches somehow seems to be only parts of some bigger deity, a caricature, a desolate creature that houses within itself feelings and secrets not to be shared. Lindsey always feels as if Frank were hiding something from them, and his no-bullshit manner is just a facade to masquerade his nondescript secrecies.

She guesses nothing is certain. And now, staring at Frank through clandestine glances, she realizes that Frank has changed. Those changes are physical, dramatic even, but personality-wise, aura-wise, she still finds herself encumbered with that uncertainty that has plagued her image of the former guitarist. Frank no longer wears makeup, his hair is different, even his smile is broader, but nothing really changed.

"It's okay, Lynz." - He reassures her, turning his eyes to Bandit. "Uncle Fronk loves you too, Bandee."

Bandit cracks a childish smile and Lindsey does, too. Frank likes it when Lindsey laughs - she always laughed when with Gerard at their concerts, at the post-show parties, at the drunken shenanigans, and when he saw her earlier today he was flabbergasted. Astounded. Lindsey looked pleased when he caught her smoking outside the hospital a little while ago. She looked guilty. She was happy, of course, but that wasn't the kind of happy that Frank has been so familiar with. It wasn't the smitten, lovable glow, it was the guilty pleasure, escapist glow. It was as if she had escaped, had eloped, from her marriage with Gerard and was finally enjoying some alone time.

Had she been so inflicted by the disbandment? Had she been so inflicted by Gerard's depression?

Of couse she has, goddammit. She's his wife, for Christ's sake. She was the one who cleaned up after him every time he got too drunk and started vomiting all over the place. She was the one who drove him all the way uptown to see a therapist. She was the one who had to juggle taking care of Bandit and nursing her depressed husband back to vitality.

She deserved that smoke. She deserved to feel alive once in awhile, and she deserved to know that she still has her whole life in front of her. Her band hasn't broken up. She still has a fighting chance at life.

Frank knows she isn't being selfish or insensitive to Gerard for hiding the truth from him. But how can Gerard know that? Yelling at Lindsey and locking himself away from the world in Mikey's hospital bed isn't exactly a panacea, is it?

"Frank, why is my husband's nose broken?"

Frank turns around in minute surprise. Not at what she is asking, but what she has said. She said "my husband".

Somehow Frank finds that phrase amusing.