BEFORE
My name wasn’t always Sam.
When I came into existence I had no name, no memories, nothing.
Blood is my first memory.
It stained the room, a large fleshy circle where a man’s leg should have been. He was screaming, the man. Women in white gowns dabbed his face with cloth and leather strapped his limbs to the bed. Another walked in, wiping off a metal saw slick with that same shade of red. She threw the thing down aimlessly, smacking her legs so the liquid would transfer from her hands to her once white dress. She grabbed a needle and injected the screaming man with clear liquid. He struggled against the binds and the women. It took a while for the screaming to die down. It digressed into unrhythmic moans till the man’s consciousness faded.
I should’ve been scared. I think a part of me was. Another was curious. About the blood. Blood is accusatory. It spreads, and it stains, and its reach is infinite.
I wanted to know why.
My first memory makes hospitals seem like a violent place. Hospitals are not violent. Hospitals diffuse violence and cure its victims.
My second memory is less gruesome. More sudden. Just as sad.
There was another soldier. This one was silent. You might’ve thought there was no life behind his eyes till he blinked. He took breath after breath, one hand on his chest. Then, his hand fell. His eyes closed. He stopped breathing. Red pooled from the spot he held and dripped from his fingers.
When the one-legged man woke, he started to scream again.
He crawled out of the cot, dragging himself across the floor. Screaming, crying, screaming some more. He grabbed the other soldier’s bloody hand hanging off the bed and wailed into it. The nurses had to pry him off.
Until he fainted, the soldier stared at the dead man. He cursed, as coherently as he could. He cursed the war. He cursed the nurses and doctors and hospital alike. He cursed death most of all.
My second memory makes hospitals seem like a field. A place of harvest for death to collect. I don’t argue with that. I challenge it silently as the soldier silently waits to die. Same as him, I don’t believe it. I accept it. I have to.
Death is not a being. It is a state of being. We humanize it, demonize it, give it a soul because it is easier to condemn something with a face. Disease is in the same boat, only it’s a lot easier to convict it. Disease has reason. Virus, bacteria, defected cells. Those already have a face.
Time doesn’t need a face at all.
Time steals openly.
Such carelessness on its part is enough to be found guilty.
Guilty of what, though? Time, Disease, and Death don’t hate us. The world and its many shadows are not capable of hate. They simply don’t care about us. They don’t need us. They never made, and as such, never broke any promises. We are mediums through which they play.
I call them shadows. Sometimes, enemies, although that may be a bit hypocritical. They are mediums through which we play too.
Disease is weaponized. It’s profited off of. Humans rarely search to cure diseases. There’s more value in treating someone for the rest of their life than in healing them once. Death is no different. It’s a means to an end, a tool, a toy. With it, the people at the top of the pyramid decide how many will be sacrificed at the bottom.
No one is better at killing people than people.
Time is different. Chase it, gamble with it. No matter the game, time likes to play because it always wins. But unlike its partners, time can be kind. Or maybe that is an illusion too. Maybe time has teeth only to grin and a voice only for the last laugh.
I don’t understand it enough for a concrete answer.
I don’t understand a great many things. I give them all souls too. Blood has a soul. Books have souls. Broken things have souls–especially broken things. Even the hospital has a soul traipsing through the halls, watching, like an onlooker inside its own bones.
Souls are susceptible to suffering.
That’s why I bury memories.
Living them once was enough. Reliving them is a destructive habit.
But my memories of him are ones I have buried inside a glass coffin.
He is the one who broke a pattern in the red.
He was a little boy who rose with the sun when the night was all I knew.
—
There is never any wasted time with him. He plays with life to every extent.
“Hello, wall,” he says, dragging pudgy hands across the ashy, poor paint. “Hello, floor.” The uneven tiles clack against his feet. “Good morning, sir,” he says to a passing doctor. “Good morning, sky,” he says to a passing window with a crack in the checkered glass.
The boy gives souls to all. He calls them his friends.
Even his disease has a soul. It’s an all-encompassing kind. His medication, his exams, his treatments are all to be administered exactly on time. Little does it know, time has a challenger.
The boy laughs, rocking his legs back and forth at the foot of the bed. The nurse takes his temperature and then reaches for his morning pills. He opens his mouth just enough for her to slip them in. With a bite, he shuts it before she can and runs off, laughing.
Time, along with many nurses and doctors, ends up having to chase him. Him and his bursts of rebellion. When they catch him, he always asks the nurse or the doctor to stay and play with him. They sigh, apologize, and say they have other patients to treat. He is the same with service workers who bring him his food. The service workers shake their heads daily, apologize, and say they have other patients to feed. The boy smiles and says he understands. Then he says hello to his plate, to his fork, to his cup, and he eats on his own.
I follow the boy after his morning medication round and his check-ups. I am not curious about those parts of his life. I already understand what’s wrong with him. I want to understand what he is. I want his in between moments.
An explorer, he runs across the halls without care, asking questions, not to anyone in particular, but just to ask.
He has no care who is watching or where he is. He moves like he is a part of the hospital, a universal puzzle piece. He becomes, as I am: A background detail noticed but not questioned like the color of a wall or the weight of the front door.
However, for how constant the boy is to this place, he has no constants of his own.
No one ever visits him. Not parents, not family, not a soul. He has his usual nurses and doctors, but there is a barrier there, as there must be. He is one of their many patients. He is not their one anything. He is nobody’s one.
That is a very lonely existence.
Little did time know, when it gave him to me, that I am lonely too…
I’ve never spoken to a patient before.
In fact, I’ve never spoken to anyone before.
At first, I hide. Then, I observe the boy from the threshold of his room. He plays with tiny potted plants on the ground.
“Good morning,” he says when he sees me peeking out, not the way you’d greet a stranger. I flinch, retreating almost fully out of view. He cocks his head to the side, laughing. “Are you shy?”
“I–” My voice is fresh, a muscle that’s never been used. I swallow, stretch it, let my tongue move in my mouth, calibrating. “Hello.”
“People aren’t supposed to see me without a mask and gloves,” he says, but his caution wavers with a shrug. “You can come in if you want, though. I don’t mind.”
I hesitate.
The problem is I know him. But he’s never had a chance to know me. He is a painting I’ve been admiring for a long time without the courage to walk into it.
The boy looks up, taking me in as I do him. His clothes are well kept, but his shoes are muddy. His hair is soft, ungroomed, but his gaze is full of curious edges.
“Have we met before?” he asks. “I feel like I know you.”
“In–” I stutter, walking into the frame and brushstrokes. “In a way.”
Sweetness and soil flood my nose. His walls are bland, but there are undeniable hints of him accenting the space. Some books on the night table, a string of lights behind the bed, the plants in his hands.
“You like them? I took these from the garden outside.”
“Why did you take them?” I ask.
He makes an ‘I don’t know’ sort of noise.
“I thought they could be my friends.” He picks them up in his arms, placing each with care on the windowsill. The sun caresses their leaves as it does when it wakes him.
“Do you live here too?” he asks.
I nod.
He hums in response. “Do you want to play with me?”
“I’m not sure how to play.”
“That’s alright. I’ll teach you.”
We walk out of his room together. He puts his hands in his pockets and looks at me with a smile back over his shoulder—a smile with teeth and shut eyes. A smile with teeth and shut eyes. A smile you feel rather than see.
“My name’s Sam.”
Sam.
Does Sam know he has suns in his eyes?
—
Sam and I are physically similar. I tried to model myself after him, but Sam’s mind is mine’s opposite. He is brave without having to try, animated by little things. He is mischievous, strolling into places he doesn’t belong and speaking without care for his volume or who is around.
He leaps, he shrieks, he exists freely.
He questions so much about his world, yet he doesn’t question me.
In his eyes, I am just another child. A playmate.
Sam teaches me a great many things. He teaches me about toys, wooden figures we assign voices, and story roles. Of tiles, we jump in patterns for hopscotch, of nooks and closets where hiding from each other is a great game of suspense. I’m not very good at games, but Sam says it’s okay.
He puts aside his routine, and he shows me his world. There are patients he knows and likes. An older woman who gives him bread, a mother is waiting for her baby to be born, and so many more. He greets them through the doors with a wave, and only once he makes them smile does he move on to the next.
“Are you hungry?” Sam asks as the dark draws over the hospital.
“Do you want to eat in your room?” I ask.
“No.” He smiles with that twinkle of mischief. “Let’s go eat outside.”
“Are we allowed outside?”
“Knights are allowed everywhere in their castle,” Sam says.
“Knights?”
“Yes. I’m a knight. I’m the castle’s protector. Like in fairy tales,” he whispers, his face dropping when he realizes I don’t understand. “You’ve never heard of fairy tales?”
I shake my head.
“Oh.” Sam blinks for a while, his cheeks and lips puffed out. “Okay. I’ll tell you some.”
We tiptoe through the hall, Sam giggling under his breath the whole time, bread rolls stuffed up his sleeves. He runs once we’re out of sight, up, up, up till we reach a stairwell.
Sam opens the window at the very top and ushers me through it. We emerge, and there, I meet the sky. It’s cold and gray, the ground harsh, and the wind harsher.
“This is the roof,” Sam says. I shiver, hunching and rubbing my hands up and down my arms. Sam seems to like it, though. He takes the bread rolls from his sleeves, gives me one, and sits.
“Look.” He points up. Against a layer of darkness, the sky wears lights. They’re dull, yet they flare like candle flames about to go out.
“Those are my stars,” Sam whispers like it’s a secret he trusts me to keep. “They’re the most beautiful things in the world.”
Stars, I think, the word playing voicelessly on my tongue.
“Are you a star?” I ask.
Sam’s mouth opens, a surprised sound stuttered from his throat. Then, he laughs, the eruption cracky and full.
“You’re silly,” he says, and when his laughter ceases, “We can share my stars if you want.”
It’s a breath. A promise. The first promise he ever makes me.
I nod with a pleased hum.
We eat together, me in silence, him telling me his fairytales. They’re grand stories, ones with neat endings and no loose ends to tie. I ask him why stories in real life don’t end that way. He tells me fairy tales end however we want them to. He says fairytales are meant to teach people lessons like his nurse, Ella, says, but he doesn’t believe that. He thinks stories are meant to make people feel things.
I ask him what that’s like. To feel.
The wind passes between us, stretching his grin.
He says I ask good questions.
Sam slides his hand across the stone on his last bite of bread.
“This is our castle,” he says. “Will you protect it with me?”
I blink. The knights in all his fairytales are brave. They conquer kingdoms and rescue all in danger. For all I am, I am not brave. I chew on my lip, chew on the question.
Sam senses my doubt.
“There’s a lot of sick people here, you know,” he says, creeping a little closer. It’s the first time I notice how golden his eyes are, flares of yellow across a dark background. It’s a detail you can only see from up close, not just by admiring a painting but by being a part of it.
Sam smiles. A smile you can feel. “We can protect them, you and I. Would you like that?”
I would. Even without bravery at my side. Already, from a single look, a single span of a day, I know so much about him.
Sam. A name, simple and warm, but at once musical in the right tone. Yellow. In his eyes, bright when he is happy, even brighter when he is sad. His voice is young and high yet comfortable no matter the listener. He holds himself like a character, a hero in a novel, a knight without a self-conscious bone in his body.
“I’ll teach you how to be a knight, okay?” he says.
“Really?”
“Yes. I like playing with you.” He looks at my face the way I look at his. Reading me. “What did you say your name was?”
“I don’t have a name.”
“You don’t?”
“I am–” I begin, “–I am not like the other broken things you know.”
A name is relevant. Backgrounds don’t need relevancy. That defeats their purpose.
Sam, with the sky illuminated at his back, thinks otherwise.
“We can share my name then. Your name will be Sam too. I decided.” He declares into the cool breeze, leaning closer to me. “Go ahead and try it. Say, I’m Sam.”
My voice is small. Everything feels small compared to him.
His name feels anything but.
“I’m Sam,” I say.
With glee, one of Sam’s hands, soft and baby-like, grabs ahold of mine, and I become the stone beneath our feet. He is warm, the gold in his eyes traveling down his body, through his skin.
Fire flickers between our palms. It melts all the way to my bones.
I’ve never been touched before. I shudder from it, suddenly wondering if the fluttering in my heart is what they call feeling.
“I’m happy I met you, Sam,” the boy says.
“Ha-ppy?” I whisper.
“Mhm.” He doesn’t let go of my hand. He plays with it, explores it.
“I like you,” he says. His cheeks flush, gaze averted. “You’re beautiful.”
I’ve never been called beautiful. I’ve heard the words and watched them escape the lips of lovers. But many words, I find, aren’t always truthfully spoken. People lie. Children lie. But children rarely lie about beauty.
“Will you play with me tomorrow?” Sam asks.
“Yes.”
Yes, I say in my head again. All my tomorrows are yours.
“Thank you,” Sam says. He kisses me on the cheek and climbs back inside, waving. “Goodnight, Sam. Have sweet dreams…”
The day I met him, even buried, is a memory laced with the joy of its happening and the pain of its passing. Because even if I told you I have forgotten, you can’t trust me.
You don’t ever forget the first time you fell.
