“Everybody stand clear!” the doctor ordered, raising her hands, backing away from my father, “Administering shock in 3… 2… 1…”

Boom! His chest leapt off the bed and slammed back down, jiggling the wires. Sightless eyes, still half open, stared at the ceiling. His neck muscles were convulsing around the side of his throat. Mouth gaping. And then he began to moan.

It was a horrible sound. A deep, inhuman groan. The sound my grandfather made when he lay dying and could no longer speak. Except monstrously loud. I stared in horror at his gaping mouth, watching the soft skin of his neck pulse as his tongue and larynx convulsed.

“Shit, he’s choking.”

“Should we–”

“Hannah, get the sucker thingie and let’s make sure he doesn’t choke.”

One of the nurses stepped over my legs. I tried to shrink back into my chair, but there was no place to go to get out of their way. The nurse struggled getting around to the corner of the room. The sucker thing she took down from the wall was a device that looked like an awkward hybrid of large, automatic toothbrush and a tiny handheld vacuum cleaner. When the nurse had passed the sucker thingie to the doctor, she turned a dial on the machine mounted in the wall which was connected to the sucker thingie by a thick plastic hose. The doctor forced the tip of the ‘sucker thingie’ between my father’s lips and swished it in his throat.

Everything in the hospital reminded me of something we had at home.

The sucker thingie was a lot like the device dentists use for cleaning teeth–just hoses and pumps. The machine the nurses shocked my father with was just a fancy version of the defibrillators I’d seen lifeguard training. And was the ECG, with all its colored wires and nodes pasted on my father’s hairy chest really that different from the Apple watch that had detected his lapse into atrial fibrillation last night?

My father was still groaning even after the doctor fixed his choking.

“He snores,” I said, apologetically.

The doctor glanced up, surprised.

“Good point,” she said.

She took the oxygen tube out of my father’s nose, stuck it between his front teeth and turned to discuss something with the resident peering over her shoulder.

Normally, I would have appreciated her comment. I would have even felt clever, important, glad that a person with authority had acknowledged me. But right then it just scared me, and angry, thinking that someone like me, a dumb kid who knew nothing about medicine, was giving advice to the doctor who held my father’s life in her hands.

The doctor offered to do the big shock–I don’t remember what the procedure’s name is—to restart his heart, but she was nervous about it. Atrial fibrillation slows the top half of the heart, causing the blood to become unevenly distributed in the arteries, too much here, too little there, so when she restarted his heart, there was a high risk of blood clots forming. The danger is worse over time. After twenty-four hours, it would be safer to reschedule a few days later so the cardiologists could pump him full of blood thinners first since a clot might lead to a stroke like the one my grandmother had when I was born. The longer his moaning continued, the longer his sightless, open eyes stared at the ceiling, the more I began to wonder if we had made a grave mistake.

I was angry again. My father had gone into atrial fibrillation around ten thirty the night before, based on the data from his Apple watch, and we had arrived at the hospital around noon. But it had taken nine hours of waiting before he was actually admitted into the emergency room. So by the time he was actually seen by the doctor, we were pressing into that twenty-four hour zone where clots could form. The doctor, apologetic, told us that it could be plus or minus a few hours depending on whether we trusted the watch. Was its data accurate? Had it detected the first irregular murmur of my father’s atrial fibrillation? I was angry we even had to make this choice in the first place. But my father trusted his watch.

But now, watching his induced sleep, I was afraid. What if the watch had been wrong? What if his A-Fib had started hours earlier? The doctor kept mentioning the possibility of stroke, muttering in that off-hand way people do when they are reassuring themselves of a tough decision. Did she really trust the watch? I was angry that they had kept us in the hospital for so long without giving us a room. This was their fault. It wouldn’t have been a problem if they’d taken us—

“Hey Mr. Gordon, wake up!” The doctor slapped my father’s shoulder. “Hey there. Mr. Gordon? Wake up.”

Sitting forward I forgot to be angry. All that mattered was my father’s wellbeing. I watched the doctor cradle my father’s head and gently pat his cheek. And very slowly, my father’s eyes began to move from looking up, down to looking at her face. He stared in silence. She said his name. He said nothing, still in a haze. Then his face loosened and he closed his mouth.

“Mr. Gordon, I’m Dr. Chan. You’re in the ER, remember? In Hillsboro? Remember?”

“I…” he said.

“Welcome back! I think it all worked out okay.”

Still reeling from the horror of watching my father be electrocuted and my anger at the hospital, I had forgotten the original purpose of the big shock. On his vitals monitor, all the blinking numbers had stopped. His blood pressure was back to its normal, albeit high: one twenty-eight over eighty. His heart rate was slowing down to a leisurely fifty-eight. And there was no sign of irregular pulses.

“They fixed you,” I said.

His eyes slowly moved to me. Then he looked back at the doctor, blinking. My joy disappeared. It seemed like he couldn’t recognize me. My thoughts raced. Clots? Stroke?!

I wanted to ask the doctor something, anything, but I didn’t want to disturb her, as if this were some kind of verbal surgery, a coaxing of a soul back into a body. Though, really all she did was stand by my father’s pillow and lightly pat his cheek, waiting for him to shake off his confusion. He blinked again and seemingly recognized what was going on around him.

“Did it work?” he asked.

“Looks like it did,” Dr. Chan said.

“Wonderful…” he said.

My father slowly looked around the room, taking in the white walls, the plastic hoses, the stainless steel devices and the teal curtains partitioning us from the hallway. He looked at the IV in his arm, the defibrillator cart at the foot of his bed, and then at us until he finally seemed to recognize that the people around him were different from the machines. Hannah, the RN, was standing in the corner by his left shoulder, next to a chair with his shirt—a checkered patterned button down—and an old green-brown coat he’d worn since I was a baby, along with the hefty novel he was reading, no doubt something long-listed for the Booker Prize.

Then he looked at me, sitting in the next chair, with his hiking boots under my feet. The many tendrils of the defibrillator cart were still attached to his soft, hairy body. Dr. Chan stood on the opposite side of the bed, by my father’s head, while another RN—the de facto anesthesiologist—sat on a small, wheeled stool. The resident hovered at Dr. Chan’s shoulder and another nurse moved awkwardly around the bed. This scene seemed like a lot for my father to take in while the anesthesia was still wearing off. He stared.

“Well, that’s that then,” Dr. Chan said, stepping away, “Once the anesthesia’s worn off, you’re free to go. I do want to see you move around a little bit before I let you go though.”

And with that, she left. Hannah the RN squeezed past me again and disappeared out the door. The resident followed them. The other RN, a curly haired guy with a thick country drawl, wheeled himself over to check the IV.

I could tell my father was recovering because he began telling the poor RN all about our pine tree farm, how we grow loblolly pines on a twenty-year cycle, and how it makes good money, but with the climate shifting he’s worried about the trees not getting enough water. At one point, he asked the RN where he was from. The RN named a small town in South Carolina, and my father asked him what city it was near.

“Rock Hill would be the closest big city, I guess,” the nurse said, tapping on the monitor. “Yeah, just south of Charlotte.”

“I been to Rock Hill one time,” my father said, “It was famous for a riot that happened there when the freedom riders came through in the sixties.”

He was extremely calm as he spoke, and weirdly still.

“They had a riot. A race riot. Your grandparents,” he said looking at me, “they owned a steakhouse in Charlotte and they fed the freedom riders. Then their steakhouse burned down and they moved us up to New York because they were scared the KKK were trying to kill us. We didn’t move back down here until I was in high school. Different times.”

He fell silent.

Different times indeed, I thought. For being high, my father was impressively articulate, but I felt bad for the nurse. He probably hadn’t clocked into work today to hear about a race riot near his hometown. But he didn’t say anything. He just printed out the ECG charts and a packet of paperwork that he read to us, walking us through a bunch of protocols, stuff I don’t remember. I was too relieved to think anything else mattered now that my father had woken up.

“Basically, watch out for signs of stroke,” the RN said, looking up from the paperwork.

“Do we need to schedule a follow up appointment?” I asked.

The RN glanced over his shoulder at a computer screen. “Right now, the next two available appointments are either December twenty-fourth at 3:00pm, or the thirtieth, any time after 1:00pm. What’re you thinking?”

“Should we do the twenty-fourth?” my father asked me.

“That’s Christmas Eve, isn’t it?”

“Probably be less people.”

The nurse shrugged, “You never know.” He said, typing on a keyboard.

“I’ll put you down for it on the twenty-fourth then. That should just be a routine check-up visit. Do you have any questions?”

“A’ight bet. I don’t have any other questions,” I said.

The nurse’s brown, square-toed cowboy boots clicked on the linoleum hospital tiles when he stood up to leave.

“Nice boots by the way.”

The nurse flashed a smile when I complimented him.

“I have a pair of those at home,” he said, nodding at my father’s boots.

Then he left.

I wondered what he thought of my father’s anesthesia-induced history lesson. I wondered what I thought of it myself. I’d never heard about this before. The father I knew wasn’t a quiet man, but he was aggressively positive, often the one to say “Let’s not focus on that.” Or “Can’t we find something to be happy about?” It made me wonder what else he didn’t talk about? I sensed he had accidentally let me in on a secret.

My father seemed close to coherent now. But as I was about to ask him about dinner, there was one last nurse, the awkward one who moved anxiously around the bed. I thought she had left with the doctors, but she had hung around, half wrapping herself in the teal curtain while the other nurses worked. She was a young woman with pink scrubs and braids, probably not even out of high school yet.

“I’m sorry, this is really… my fault, I’m sorry,” she said, “But I kind of forgot to take your, you know, your payment information.”

She looked at the linoleum floor, clutching her clipboard to her chest.

We stared at her.

“You know, at the front desk. I’m supposed to, well I just kinda forgot…and well, yeah, your copay is two thousand dollars.” She said in one exhale.

We were silent. She looked up. Her gaze darting from me to my father, checking our expressions. Her face looked mortified, like she would almost have preferred the procedure went wrong so she could tell me my father was dead instead of asking for his credit card information.

“Would you like to use cash or card?”

My father’s jaw clenched, but he said nothing. There’s nothing we could do, really. The price of a life is whatever they set it at. Neither one of us felt like saying anything, so I fished around in the pocket of my father’s coat until I found his wallet and passed it to him. He opened it, thumbed through, and took out a gold American Express card. The trembling nurse gratefully took it and disappeared out the door.

“Fucking unbelievable,” my father muttered, “How’s that shooter kid doing these days?”

I laughed.

“I’m telling you it’s gonna be a hung jury,” I said, “You’re funny when you’re high. What else are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking I want a Dr. Pepper, and I want to go home!”

There was a vending machine down the hallway. So, I walked down the corridor and through a pair of heavy double doors. Knowing how much my father cared about his blood pressure and cutting out sodas, I found it hard to believe he wanted a Dr. Pepper. So, when I was staring into the glass of the humming machine I bought him a Gatorade as well.

When I made my way back the double doors were locked. So, I had to wait for an orderly to open them. Much to my surprise, when I returned, my father took the Dr. Pepper. I wondered if he used to drink them when he was younger, my age, before I was born.

When the front desk nurse came back with my father’s credit card he said, “Merry Christmas!”

“Merry Christmas,” she said, without a trace of irony.

My father just shook his head.

After she left, I helped my father unclip all the wires from the nodes that were plastered across his soft body. The doctor advised us to wait until my father could shower to take the nodes off.

My father pulled his undershirt back on. I handed him his boots and jacket. We could hear Dr. Chan arguing with a patient down the hall who was insisting that he wouldn’t go home until they treated some condition he didn’t seem to really have. I looked at my father and, without a word, he agreed that we should not wait for her permission to leave. Balancing himself as if he didn’t really believe he could, my father walked out of the ER, his heart beating normally. He showed me his Apple watch to confirm this fact.
In the dark car driving home, he asked how it had gone.

“They put you on the anesthesia and went ‘nightie night’ and—”

“They really said that?”

“No, that’s just the way I’m telling the story. You know you can tell the story all different ways. That’s just, me. I said nightie night. Not them. What’s the last thing you remember?”

“The last thing I remember is they told me to lay my head back and go to sleep.”

“Yeah, that happened.”

Streetlights washed us in orange, illuminating his face. I could see the small stubble on his chin, the creases beneath his eyes, the shadows in the folds of his skin and the streetlights highlighting his shiny forehead. His eyes were firmly set on the road ahead of us.

Night thinned around us. I took a breath.

“They hit you with a big shock, and then it was…” My heart tightened in my chest. I didn’t want to feel again what it had felt like in that room. The look on his face, the tiny notes of fear and despair before they put him under.

I distance myself from painful feelings until they’re gone, and it seems like they belonged to someone else. I’ve sat with an IV in my arm, looking into the eyes of an anesthesiologist, wondering if I am going to wake up from that twilight slumber. The only experience I’ve had that might be like death. The nothingness terrifies me, yes. It fills my stomach with a boulder of sadness. It seems such a tragedy to die. As terrible as the world can be, I would miss not living in it. When I look at my father in the passenger seat, I feel like I did when my grandfather died… the world made worse without him in it. And how badly I want to clutch my father to me and tell him he can never leave me.

But all I say is, “Yeah, it was a lot.”

The streetlights flash over us. I glance at his face again, tracing years in between the wrinkles and sags of his skin. He stares into the passenger mirror. Maybe looking at himself? Somehow, I get the feeling his thoughts are not so different from mine.

“And then you woke up and you started talking that poor nurse’s ear off about the fucking pine trees. You told that guy all about the trees and weather systems and yearly average rainfall and timber prices and the debt structuring on our farm.”

“He must have been a good sport,” my father says.

The headlights cut a lonely beam through the dark. I can’t bear to drive in silence. I connect my phone to the car’s Bluetooth and play something, anything…I land on the singer Lorde. Just a bare human voice to accompany me this night. I want her to make this sadness feel beautiful.

C. Henry Stevens is a writer from Halifax County, Virginia. His fiction has appeared in New Plains Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, and ARTWIFE. A reader for The Colored Lens, he is dual MA and MFA candidate at Old Dominion University. Find him on Instagram @Abimapixsey.