Playtime

Bart Hopkins Jr. 

Copyright © 2013 Bart Hopkins Jr. 

All rights reserved 

Cover Design by Book Beautiful 

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and
retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only
exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review. 

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters,
places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are
used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events,
or locales is entirely coincidental. 

Printed by CreateSpace 

North Charleston, SC 

Published by Bart Hopkins Jr. 

Galveston, Texas 

ISBN-10: 149487783X 

ISBN-13: 978-1494877835 

First Printing January 2014 

Playtime

 Many times things change gradually, almost
imperceptibly, shading into each other like the dusk and the night. But
sometimes they change in an instant. 

 Blaine Hadrock died at 1:04 on a Tuesday
afternoon in June. It was typical Galveston summer fare: south breeze blowing, sun
pale white and fiery, beach full of tourists and traffic, a tapestry of human
and animal players enjoying the scenery. 

 He was cruising on his maroon 1100 Honda Shadow, just
down the street from his house, when the green Toyota Corolla backed out of the
drive without seeing him, crunched into his rear fender and sent him sailing.
He still should have made it. The impact threw him toward the side of the road
and the grass. He had his matching maroon helmet on, but his flight path off
the bike vectored him into a telephone pole. He careened straight at it, and
instinctively, in that frozen flash of time, was trying to pull his head and
body away, but there really wasn’t anything to push against, so he sailed on
into it. 

 He had always known the bike was dangerous. He
used to say that anything that would fall over if you weren’t holding it up
had
to be dangerous to ride. A car wouldn’t do that. And he’d been in plenty of
tight spots on the Shadow. He’d been run off the side of the road on FM 2004 a
couple of times, just barely holding on as the cycle skittered toward the white
line and the suicidal slickness of the grass. He'd developed the survivalist skill
of reading the intentions of drivers when cruising on it. But he missed the
Corolla coming. A parked car blocked his vision till it was too late. 

 The girl driving the Corolla freaked out. She
hadn’t seen him at all. Common enough, the way bikes managed to find that blind
spot drivers have, hadn’t even known he was there until she heard the savage
crunch of metal on metal, felt the impact and whipped her head around, just
caught sight of him smacking into the pole and dropping to earth like a cow after
it was zapped for slaughter. 

 She had screamed and gone a bit crazy for a
second, then had whipped out her phone and gotten an ambulance headed their
way. Hustled across the street to him lying flat on his back, unmoving, not
breathing, and started CPR on him. She wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do
in his case, but it was all she knew. 

The paramedics had continued working on him, revived
him on the way to the hospital and into the emergency room, but then lost him
once more and called his death at 1:04. 

So they were surprised when he came to life again
about 1:11. 

Darkness all around him. Struggling, struggling,
then he stops. Floats. Like he is on his back floating in water. Feels the
warmth and relaxes. No need to struggle now. Brightness in the distance. A roar
like the ocean in a conch shell. He can feel himself seeping out from the spot
he is in to all the others that surround him. A great sense of peace fills him,
and he relaxes totally, completely, like he has never relaxed before, and he
senses a melding occurring: brightness flowing in and the darkness receding.
Why had he ever struggled against this? The light shimmers and expands and
fills his vision until it is all that there is.   

"Hardrock" was what they called him more
often than Blaine, but when he wakes up in the hospital bed the next day, he doesn’t
care what they call him. He doesn’t know where or who he is. He vaguely
remembers the Toyota crashing into him and sailing toward that pole. One second
he’d been on the way home, and the next he was a guided missile. 

 He is lying on his back, and he stares up at the
ceiling, trying to remember, but everything after that is a blur. He tests
extremities, flexing fingers and toes, then legs and arms, popping elbows and
knees. Everything seems to work. His head hurts. His neck too. He touches
himself gingerly, probing here and there. Around his neck is one of those
flexible, soft collars. He checks down below. All his junk is still there, but
he is hooked up to a catheter. Great. 

 A pretty, blonde nurse about his age, 35 or so,
comes briskly into the room carrying a clipboard. 

 "You’re up," she says. 

 "I guess," he replies. Blinks. 

 "How do you feel?" 

 "Head hurts some. Neck too." He tilts
his head, pops his neck. 

 "You smacked a telephone pole. Not the
best
thing for your head."   

 "No? That your expert medical opinion?"
he grunts.   

 "My, my," she says, "might be time
to check your temperature." She holds up a thermometer. It doesn't appear
to be the type for oral use. 

   He raises himself up on an elbow. It doesn’t
seem to hurt all
that
bad. 

 "This has been fun, Nurse… Ratchet," he
says, "but I have people to see and things to do." She cocks her head
and shakes it. Then puts the thermometer back down, at least. 

 "Kimmy," she says. "Not today, you
don't. The doctor will be by in a few minutes, but they are going to want to
run some more tests on you, since it’s a head injury. They ran some scans on
that and the neck and spine already." 

 "Feels okay," he replies. Checks her
out. Kimmy is attractive. 

 "Standard stuff when you hit something as
hard as you did," she says, bending over him with one of those tiny lights.
"Let’s see those eyes." He squints up into the light. He can see the
swell of her breasts. She does one eye then the other. 

 "They look good." 

 "Great," he says, though they are
talking about different things. 

It’s more than a few minutes, more like a few
hours, when the door swings open again and a tall, young man wearing a lab coat
comes in. He is thin with spectacles, freckled, somewhere in his thirties. He
smiles at Blaine, buck teeth flashing. 

 "Well, so how you doing?" he asks.
"I’m Dr. Jenkins." 

 "Feeling pretty chipper, Doc. Think I can
get out of here?" 

 "We’re going to run a few more tests, make
sure everything is doing what it should. Keep you another day or two. You hit
that pole like a bomb is what I hear." He grins at Blaine: an amiable,
likable sort of guy. 

 "That’s what they tell me, Doc." 

 "Did they tell you that they pronounced you
dead at 1:04 yesterday afternoon?" 

 Blaine says, "Dead? Missed that part." 

 "Yep, dead. You are a lucky man, Blaine. You
were gone for a while. They had given up on you, called it, when all of a
sudden you took this huge gasp, scared the hell out of everybody and just
started breathing again. You do have a slight concussion. So, just let us look
you over and make sure that head is all right. No need rushing out of here.
You’re a miracle, my man. No hurry now. We don’t want to lose you again." 

 "Right, Doc. Right," Blaine says. He
sighs. No harm trying. 

 "And it’s a miracle you didn’t suffer more
damage to your neck and spine. X-rays and scans look good, though. How do those
areas feel?" 

 "Neck hurts, Doc, but everything feels like
it still works." 

 "You must have hit that pole at an angle,
glanced off it," Jenkins says. "If you’d hit it head-on, I don’t
think we’d be having this conversation." 

 "Thank God for helmets," Blaine says. 

 "Amen and hallelujah to that," says the
doctor. "I really can’t believe so many people don’t wear them. I’d like
to have them come see what we do in the ER. I think they’d change their mind.
It’s bad enough when you have one on. Without one, your eggs really get
scrambled." 

The doctor then proceeds to put Blaine through
some tests. What day it is, where he is, and what season. Counting down from
100 by 7. Naming some objects: his stethoscope, a pencil, the clipboard. The
stethoscope stumps Blaine for a second. Dr. Jenkins reads a sentence from the
chart he is carrying and tests Blaine's comprehension. He mentions three
objects to Blaine, does a few other tests then checks his recall of the three
objects. Finger to the nose and such. Makes him copy a simple drawing.   

 "I’m not much of an artist," Blaine
says, taking the pad and pencil, but manages a not-too-bad replica of some
geometric figure. "What does all this stuff really tell you, Doc? Seems fairly
simple, most of it." 

 "You’d be surprised, Blaine. The tests we've
just run through cover your sensory perception, motor control, working memory,
language, spatial skills, and more." 

 "Wow," Blaine says. He is familiar with
most of the tests, is just yanking his chain a bit, giving him a chance to
share some knowledge. You never know when you will learn something.   

 "You were without oxygen for a few minutes,
so that was a concern, but all your functions look good. By the way," he
says, "your mother called, and your brother, too, this morning, wanting to
know if they should head this way. I told them I thought you were going to be
fine, but they may be coming." 

The doctor checks his reflexes and shines the light
in his eyes again, talking affably all the while, then leaves Blaine to it and
continues on his rounds.   

Blaine is trying to process the fact that he had
been dead and come back. He doesn’t remember much, but the doctor had told him
that was normal. Sometimes some memory comes back, he said, but more likely it
won’t. Head trauma is a very dangerous, unpredictable thing. Blaine calls his
mother and brother and reassures them both that he is fine, not to come down
for this. They protest vigorously, but finally agree. 

 They give him some more function tests the next
day, and all seems normal. The test results come back fine; everything is
looking good. They had taken the catheter out the day before, and he had been
moving around on shaky legs to the bathroom and back. When he pauses to peer
out the window, he sees that he is up high in the hospital, the 6
^th
floor, and the gulf is glinting in the sunlight.   

 The room itself is one of those odd-shaped rooms,
rectangular with that pale green paint and strange diagonal corners, the
cushioned chair that folds down so visitors can sleep over, with the usual TV
set up high in one of the diagonals. 

 He tries to remember how it was to be dead, and
he actually thinks some of that is coming back to him, or at least the ride to
the hospital with the paramedics bent over him, working to try and get him
going again. He doesn’t have a visual image but seems to remember the sounds of
their voices. Or maybe he’s just convinced himself of that, since the doc told
him. He can’t be sure. 

On the third day, they tell him they are going to
cut him loose. They tell him that sometimes these injuries are not all apparent
right away, to be sensitive to the possibility of other problems. He should
wear the collar for several weeks. He has grown semi-fond of the blonde nurse,
Kimmy, and she seems to like him. She walks up to see him off. He certainly
doesn’t have many secrets from her, her being all up in his business and
everything and with those hospital gowns letting the ass show. He has to take a
wheelchair down to the lobby with his cousin Jason, who has come to take him to
the house. 

 He and Jason aren’t very close, but he has no
other relatives nearby who are available, and he is grateful to him. Jason is a
hulking young guy: long blonde hair in the surfer mode, with a real diamond
stuck in one ear. 

 "Is there a back way out?" Jason asks,
as they get ready to roll out of the room. 

 "Why," Blaine says, "you hiding
from somebody?" 

 "Nope, cuz," Jason says, "you are.
You are famous, dude. You're the miracle man who died and came back. All sorts
of reporters and people downstairs, waiting on you, man. They found out you're
going home, somehow." 

 "Shit," Blaine says. "I don’t want
to talk to any reporters." 

 "All right then, man. Back way it is." 

 Kimmy smiles and says, "Sure you guys don’t
want your 15 minutes?" 

 "Those blood-sucking vultures," Blaine
says. "You don’t want to know what I wouldn’t even give them." 

 "All right, then," she says.
"Let’s roll."