Wheezing

Cole stood alone on a hill in a world without color. There was fog all around him, and he did not know where he was. The boy could not see more than five feet ahead of him in any direction. Only the dead grass beneath his feet offered any clue as to where he was. He saw no movement in the fog, but he could hear something. At first, it sounded like the swinging of rusty chains, but as the sound grew closer, the boy could hear that there was a wet and raspy quality to it. The boy stood unmoving on the hill. The noise was louder now, almost deafening, and, to his horror, the boy realized that the sound was that of breathing. As whatever horrible thing was out there moved closer, Cole heard something else. It was a new sound in the empty world. He heard a woman’s voice, her words muffled and unintelligible. He tried to make out her words, but nothing could be heard clearly over the cacophony of wheezing. Cole felt something cold touch his shoulder, and his eyes flew open. Light and color flooded his world, and the view of wooden railings and a ceiling light came into view. He had been dreaming. None of it was real.

Cole woke that morning as he always did, breathless and wheezing. The little boy felt someone shaking him, and he heard his mother’s voice. He sat up in his bed and wiped the sleep from his eyes. His mother stood over him and was speaking in an urgent tone. “Wake up, honey! Remember we have an appointment with Doctor Mendelson today?” Cole tried to take in a breath and respond, but he couldn’t force the necessary air into his lungs. The boy began to feel his airways spasm against the pits of thick mucus that weighed them down. He tried to force out an answer to his mother in between wet and hacking coughs, but the words would not come. It was not until after a convulsion, he managed to spit out a wad of thick and stinking green mucus onto his bedsheets that the boy could finally breathe again. When his mother saw the results of her son’s productive cough, she visibly winced, but when she saw the hurt look in Cole’s eyes, she quickly reassumed her warm facade. “Oh, I’m sorry, honey.” the boy heard his mother say. “Let me go grab a paper towel, and I’ll clean that right up.” With that, his mother jumped up and headed down the hall and towards the bathroom. She called back at her son, “Just Get up and get dressed sweety. We need to get going!”

Cole sat unmoving in the bed, watching his mother leave. There was something he wanted to tell her, something about a dream and a terrible white light. The boy knew that there was something important about what he had seen, but he did not have the words to say what that was. All he knew was that he didn’t want to go back to the doctor. Cole knew as soon as he’d heard his mother say “Doctor Mendelson” That they would be going back to the hospital. He hated that place, with its blinding lights and chemical smells. Still, Cole would not resist. Instead of staying put arguing, the boy dutifully got out of his bed and began to get out of his dinosaur pajamas and dress for the car ride ahead. Cole was unusually polite and pliant for an eight-year-old boy. He never complained, rarely cried, and always did what he was told.

Cole dressed and made his way to the bathroom in silence. There was nothing to say and no one to talk to. His father had gone to work, and he knew by the sound of rapid pacing from downstairs that his mother was anxiously waiting for him to finish getting ready. Cole didn’t want to make his mother wait, so, despite his grogginess, the boy closed the bathroom door behind him and looked for his toothbrush.

Cole was tired, unnaturally so. As he stared into the tiny bathroom, It occurred to him that he had been very tired for a while now. He did not know why, but something felt wrong about the exhaustion. He’d hardly left the house the day before, and then he’d slept a full night’s sleep, but somehow, he was still tired. When Cole finally started the faucet to begin brushing his teeth, he began to drift. The boy let the water run on for minutes, lost in grogginess, but after a few moments, something woke him from his daze.

Cole felt an icy hand on his shoulder. The feeling jolted him awake, and he whipped around to look at whoever was in there with him, but to his surprise, Cole saw only an empty bathroom. There was nothing behind him at all. The boy collected himself and repeated a phrase he had heard his mother tell him many times at moments like these. “Silly boy, you’ve let your imagination get the better of you again.” He whispered the words as a mantra to himself. After a moment of heavy breathing, he regained his composure and returned to the sink. When the boy looked again into the bathroom mirror, the freezing feeling returned, and Cole let his toothbrush clatter to the tile floor.

Directly in front of him, reflected in the bathroom mirror, he saw the gaunt figure of a man standing directly behind him. The stranger was tall and dressed in an old-fashioned style. He wore a worn-out moth-bitten black suit with a dull red tie. The man was bone thin, and he seemed old and sick. His skin was pale and sallow, while his grey hair was thin and lusterless. The man stood with a slumped posture, and when Cole heard the raspy wet sound of the man breathing on his neck, he knew that the stranger was very ill.

If the little boy ever felt a pang of concern for the intruder, it was quickly chased away by what he saw in the man’s wide milky eyes. The expression was both focused and empty. The stranger stared at Cole with the unthinking appraisal of a lower predator. The boy recognized that look. It was the same expression with which he had sometimes seen the family cat watch the little birds that nested in the trees outside his bedroom window.

The stranger stood there in the mirror, his large, spindly fingers digging deep into the boy’s shoulder for a terrible moment. The grey morning light seemed to dim at that moment, and the sound of rain and blaring car horns grew silent. All Cole could hear was the cold and congested breathing of the stranger behind him.

Cole didn’t know how to respond, a desperate voice deep within him told him to scream, and he wanted nothing more than to heed its advice. But he could not scream. The boy found, to his horror, that he was utterly petrified. And so he stood there for another terrible moment until a pounding came at the door. He heard someone yelling something from beyond the doorway. The loud banging knocks finally rose above the horrible breathing and broke his reverie. In an instant, Cole whipped his head around and ran for the bathroom door. He didn’t dare look behind him for fear of what the man would do. When the boy finally got his little hands around the doorknob, he pulled so hard that the door flew open. Cole stumbled into the hallway and fell to the floor.

When He had finally come to, Cole looked up to see the worried face of his mother. He looked up and tried to tell her everything. He tried to tell her about the man in the bathroom and the horrible look in his eyes and the terrible sound of his breathing, but all that came out was a desperate wailing. All Cole could do was cry and scream like a baby. The boy felt a deep embarrassment at his own display. He had always felt a sense of pride at his aloofness and took comfort in detachment. Summoning all his self-control, Cole tried for a final time to alert his mother of the stranger in the bathroom. The boy, still babbling incomprehensibly, turned and pointed to what lay within the now-open door.

There was absolutely nothing to see. There was Nothing out of the ordinary in the bathroom except for his still-wet toothbrush lying on the tile where he had dropped it. By all appearances, it was as if no one had been in there with him at all. Cole stared at the empty room in disbelief, not knowing at all how to respond. The boy finally looked back up at his mother, searching desperately for a clue as to how to act in this unfamiliar, and increasingly uneasy situation. She, however, looked down at her son with a sickly mix of pity and adoration. “I’m sorry, honey,” his mother said. “I know you hate going to the hospital, but I promise if we keep going, you really will feel better.” His mother then flashed him an unsure smile and reached down to hug him. The boy didn’t understand at all. Something was wrong with his mother’s reaction. She held him there for longer than she might have normally, and Cole could not figure out why. Her embrace was strange and infantile. Cole felt as though his mother was holding on to him like he’d seen babies hold on to their own mothers. Finally, she set him down and said, “Come on, let’s go to the car.” His mother took his hand and walked him down their stairs. As they walked, Cole blinked and took in his mother’s words.

If she was to be believed, there had never been a man there at all. He was just overacting to the trip. Yes, he hated the hospital; yes, that was it. Cole repeated again his mother’s words like a prayer. “Silly boy, you’ve let your imagination get the better of you again.” he thought the words again and again as his mother put his raincoat on him and brought him out of the hallway. Mother and son hurried down the stairs and towards the front door. Cole had never seen his mother in such a rush, and when, after he had failed to properly put on his raincoat, she picked him up and physically carried him to the door. He had always known his mother to be an easygoing woman. Cole had never seen her act like this, and he was beginning to realize just how important this doctor’s appointment must be.

When his mother opened the door for him, Cole felt The October wind blow, piercing knives of cold rain through every opening in his jacket. The wailing storm brought forth more coughs from him, and he had to stop several times to catch his breath. Seeing her son coughing, Cole’s mother turned back, picked the boy up, and ran for the car.

The boys mother quickly deposited him in the back of the family SUV, but as she left to get in the driver’s seat, he was seized by another coughing fit. The violent coughing prompted another “Cole, are you alright, hun?” from the front seat and a concerned look in the rearview mirror. Cole managed to get a strained “I’m Ok, Mom” out between two productive wet coughs into a tissue. With some of the obstructing phlegm removed and an affirmation of safety, his mother nodded and, without another word, turned the key in the ignition and started out towards the hospital.

As they drove and the heaters gradually began to warm the inside of the car, Cole’s coughs began to grow more infrequent, and the mucus that. He felt the cold leave his stiff fingers, and the pain in his chest faded. Finally, as the car left the winding roads of the suburb his family lived in, Cole could think again. The car had slowed to a crawl as it joined with the heavy morning traffic headed into the city where Coles doctor was. His mother, who had just stopped giving him worried looks through the rearview mirror, turned on the radio. Now, with the car’s warm stale air filled by the soothing monotony of AM radio, Cole felt the exhaustion he had woken up to creep back into his dully aching limbs. The boy’s eyelids began to grow heavy, and with a yawn, he leaned his head into his seatbelt and began to drift off.

Just as Cole was starting to doze, he became aware of another sound. It was far away but rhythmic and steady. As the sound went on, it began to slowly rise above the skittering rain and grainy radio before, at last, Cole recognized it for what it was. The sound of strained wheezing breaths filled the stale air. His eyes flew open at the realization, and Cole looked desperately around the inside of the car. He searched everywhere for the horrible tall stranger, but he saw no pale sallow skin or predatory white eyes. Not satisfied, Cole scrambled to press his face to the window, but even in the rainstorm outside, he saw nothing but grey skies and the blurry rush of cars against the storm.

Finally sure that he was alone with his mother, Cole began to cry. Evidently, the crying seemed to startle his mother, who until this moment had assumed her son was sleeping. She responded quickly, “Cole, what’s wrong, sweety? Are you alright?” Cole tried to answer through his tears, “Momy the, the-,” He trailed off. What was it that was wrong? He knew there was something. Something was terribly wrong, but the little boy did not yet have the words to describe it. He wanted to tell her about the man, about the cold hand on his shoulder and the terrible fear he felt. He wanted to, but something stopped him. Looking at his mother through the rearview mirror, he saw a crack forming in her composed facade. There was something new and disturbing in her warm, familiar eyes. When he looked at his mother, Cole saw the same fear he had seen in his own eyes that morning in the bathroom. Somehow, without even the words to explain why, he understood that she knew exactly how bad things were.

Cole didn’t know what to do. He was eight years old and had no way to explain just how scared he was. Faced with his own paralyzing fear in the eyes of the woman who he had once seen as his infallible left the boy speechless. Left without language, the boy broke and continued to cry. He wailed and wailed, unable to answer any of his mother’s persistent questions. Finally, without anything else to say, the boy settled on an answer. “Mommy. The sound. I hate the sound.” With a response from her son, the fear receded in his mother’s eyes, replaced again by pity. “Honey, I know, but we’ll be at the doctor’s soon, and they’ll make it better.” Her words were sweet as honey, but Cole smelled deception. Cole didn’t know what it was about or why, but his mother was lying to him.

The breathing continued, and Cole began to realize there was nothing he could do to stop it. Left without help, it was all he could do to stifle his crying, but the boy wouldn’t stop for the rest of the drive. His mother had turned off the radio then, and Cole spent the next twenty minutes with nothing but the sound of his own muffled sobs, the drumbeat of rainfall against the windows, and the distant sound of ghastly labored breathing. It wasn’t until they pulled into the industrial-sized parking lot and walked through the hospital doors that Cole dried his eyes and tried to put on a brave face. Once again, he repeated his mother’s words, which had now become a desperate prayer, “Silly boy, you’ve let your imagination get the better of you again.” It didn’t work. Even as they entered the busy world of the large hospital, he could still hear the wheezing all around him. The sound was ever present, far away, and seemingly sourceless, but nonetheless constant.

The hospital was a world of white bathed in the ever-present glow of fluorescent lights. Now that he was finally out of the oppressive stillness of the car Cole could begin to try and distract himself from the noise. As his mother checked in at the front desk, he looked around the room in an effort to find something to take his mind off the unseen stranger’s ragged breaths. He saw a girl his own age waiting with her parents. She looked small, like him, but there were plastic tubes protruding from her nose. The tubes connected to a large metal object that Cole had seen often in the hospital. He watched the girl for a little while, trying to figure out why she wore those plastic tubes. He looked at her until she noticed and returned his stare; at this, he looked away. The next thing his eyes landed on was a sign by the entrance. In blocky lettering, it read “Mirian Jakobis pediatric ward.” the boy spent a moment trying, without success, to decipher the meaning of those words. Cole tried to look for more distractions, but the breathing was getting harder to ignore. As his mother got to work on the paperwork she had been handed by the receptionist, Cole glanced wildly around the room, trying desperately to find the source of the noises. Once again, he saw nothing, and the boy tried, again, to distract himself. He saw a wall-mounted television hanging in the corner of the waiting room broadcasting familiar but soundless cartoons to the desolate room. The breathing was now the only thing he could think of, and the boy was beginning to panic again, but just before he could melt down again, his mother finished her paperwork. Just like that, a voice called out his name from the hall of examination rooms, and they were off again. The boy and his mother were led down a sterile hallway full of identical doors.

When at last, they reached the one allotted to Cole, the orderly waved them both inside and promised the doctor would see them shortly.

Cole thought that all the examination rooms he had been in looked the same. The same jars of swaps and black pointed tips were on all the same counters. Every room was the same. The only thing to tell them apart were the decorations on the privacy curtains that hung around the examination tables. The last time he had been at the hospital, the curtains had been a field of bunnies. The time before this, it had been decorated with dogs in suits. This time, it was cutesy safari animals with black button eyes. Cole tried to examine the patterned curtains closely, once again struggling to ignore the terrible breathing, but any comfort he could find in the playful patterns was interrupted. Almost as soon as they had arrived in the sterile examination room, his doctor arrived.

D.R. Mendelson was a small woman, squat and stern, with greying brown hair. She bent down to look at him, although the short woman had hardly needed to stoop to look the boy in the face. “Hi there, buddy.” the doctor said in a tone of feigned friendliness. “I just need to talk to your mom out there in the hall. We’ll be right back, alright?” Cole wanted to scream, no, of course, that wasn’t alright. He wanted nothing less than to be left alone with the haunting breathing. Instead of voicing any objections, he looked up at his mother. When he saw the look of wild dread in her green eyes, he felt shame at his own fear and simply nodded by way of acquiescing to the doctor.

Doctor Mendelson left the room with his mother, and Cole returned to staring at the curtain.
Almost as soon as the door clicked shut, Cole heard the breathing grow louder, and at the sound, he felt his heart drop into his stomach. The boy instinctively flinched as he felt the room begin to grow cold, and reluctantly, he turned his head to where the icy feeling seemed to be coming from. He hadn’t seen the stranger come in. In fact, he was sure that no one had come in at all, let alone opened the door, but despite all knowledge and reason, there the man was. The towering pale figure stood, hunched, in the corner of the room between the door hinges and the wall. Familiar fear coursed through the boy’s veins, but he knew better than to call out. After his mother’s response this morning, he knew that nothing would be done, even if he screamed for help. Without an authority to call out to, he didn’t know what to do at all. It seemed absurd to him, but it occurred to Cole that he might wave and say hello to the stranger. After all, this is what his mother had taught him to do when meeting someone new. The boy almost went through with it, but Something inside him thought better of this. There was still something about this man that Cole could not describe, which seemed deeply and fundamentally wrong.

As it turned out, the boy didn’t have to make a decision. Barely a minute had gone by since he’d noticed the stranger in the room when the sound of the examination room door opening broke his suspension. Cole didn’t take his eyes off the stranger, even as he heard his mother enter the room and say his name. The man stood, unmoving and completely unreactive. His wretched face had not moved an inch, and his milky gaze remained fixed on the boy.

It took his mother grabbing Cole and shaking her son before he turned away from the figure. Her eyes were huge and full of worry. He could see the doctor a few feet behind his mother, hands clasped in front of her and a look of concern plastered across her composed features. Neither woman said anything about the thing in the corner. Neither of them so much as spared a glance for the stranger, but Cole could tell by the blatant fear in his mother’s eye; that, somehow, she knew what watched them.

“Are you ok, Cole? Are you ok?” the boy blinked, the thing was still there, but his mother’s pleading voice proved more needful than his fear. He didn’t know what to say, something inside him told him that he wasn’t, but the boy didn’t have to words to explain why. Without anything else to say so, he offered only, “I’m ok, Mom.” At the sound of her son’s voice, Cole’s mother relaxed and stood up from where she had been kneeling at his side. Cole noticed that despite her relaxing, the fear had not yet left her eyes. After D.R. Mendelson and his mother exchanged a series of worried looks, the doctor spoke again. “Alright, Cole. Your mom and I just needed to have a little chat about your medicine.” Cole wasn’t even paying attention to his doctor at this point. His eyes had returned again to the corner where the man still stood. The stranger hadn’t left. He remained in the same corner where he had appeared moments before, making no movement but for the slight heaving of his chest with every fetid breath. Cole wanted to scream. Neither of the adults would look at the specter, but he knew by the look in their eyes that they knew it was there. There was a terror in both pairs of eyes. Cole saw that the fear was dulled in the doctor; the horror for her was sedate and normal as if the specter in the room was a colleague and not an intruder. In his mother’s eyes, by contrast, the terror was raw and desperate like his own, but once again, despite it all, she refused to acknowledge the stranger. Cole was overwhelmed, and so he simply nodded and deferred to his elders. After all, they knew best. When the boy remained silent, doctor Mendelson understood his surrender to be what it was and moved on.

The doctor told him that he would be taking new pills, and she explained the right ways to cut them and when to take them. Finally, after the doctor, obligatorily, told him that he had done well and that he was a “very good boy,” She looked at him with deceit writ large across her face and told him, “Keep taking your medicine and your vest treatments, and you should be doing better soon.” Cole didn’t listen. All he could do was look at the man in the corner. Even as the doctor gave him her best reassurances, they fell flat. Cole knew the doctor’s promises were hollow. He knew that he wasn’t going to be ok, the boy didn’t have the words to explain why, but he knew it in his bones. He could see the wrongness of things staring at him from the corner. He saw it in those milky white predator’s eyes, and he heard it in the constant ragged breathing that still polluted the air.

Doctor Mendelson waved Cole and his mother out of her office with an air of false confidence. The boy stopped and waited as His mother lingered in the doorway and asked the doctor more questions. She said something about a “time frame” and more on “transplant,” but the boy understood none of it. Instead of trying to decipher the conversation, he focused on the breathing, which still echoed off the sterile white hospital halls. The man had vanished when they left the room, but his breathing remained. Even as they left the doctor behind and walked back towards the elevator, the sound followed them.

As they walked, Cole occasionally caught a glimpse of the stranger in the hospital. Once in the doorway to another ward, again in a crowded elevator, and finally in the cavernous parking lot in which they had left their car. He followed the boy and his into their car and sat next to Cole the entire ride home. No one spoke, not mother, son, nor stranger. Cole just sat still and regarded the stranger, who, in turn, stared down at him with empty white eyes.

By the time they had returned home, the stranger’s morbid wheezing had become familiar. Cole would never feel safe under the things ever-pale and watchful eyes, but he saw how his mother tried to ignore it, and the boy did the same. He did not cry at all as it watched him throughout the rest of the day. He did not call out when his mother left him alone with it that evening as she went to make dinner, and he did not point out the man’s presence as they ate their silent meal. It was not until that night, just after he had been tucked into bed, that the boy began to weep softly to himself. The specter did not react to his tears. It stood unmoving as ever, the sound of its labored breathing filling the empty room, its hungry white eyes fixed on the boy.

The man was still there when Cole awoke, and he remained with him all of the next day. Cole ate breakfast with the specter, he watched cartoons with it, and the whole of the day passed under its watch. When the boy was tired, something he felt more and more lately, he would lie down to sleep beneath its predatory gaze. Cole was not sent back to school. When he asked his mother why this was, she would only tell him that he didn’t have to go back to school until he was better, something she assured him would happen soon. Alone in the house all day, the stranger became his only companion. His mother spent most of the day doing housework, and his father never seemed to leave his office. Cole was growing increasingly tired, his ceaseless coughing fits left him increasingly exhausted, and the endless sea of phlegm inside his lungs proved harder and harder to clear. As the days turned to weeks, it became harder for the boy to distinguish his own breathing from that of the man’s. Cole grew weaker and weaker as the long days wore on until, at last, exactly a month to the day since he had first met the stranger that he began to understand why this had all happened.

It had been a cold and rainy day when the boy finally got his answers. Cole hadn’t seen the storm let up for all the long hours he had lain in bed. By now, he could not leave the bed at all. He could hardly even breathe, every intake of air obstructed by thick walls of sticky mucus. His mother had left cartoons on for him as entertainment, but Cole had ignored them. It was all the boy could do to take his treatments on time at this point, and he spent every other moment staring at the stranger and struggling to breathe. His mother had gone to retrieve his nightly pills when Cole felt another fit of coughing come on.

The boy struggled against the wracking coughs as he usually did for minutes, but then he began to worry. Cole couldn’t stop coughing, and now he really couldn’t breathe. He began to panic, and when he tried to scream for his mother, no sound escaped the boy’s lips as he couldn’t bring in the air to form the words. Cole did manage to fall out of bed and take the end table, crashing to the floor with him. The noise alerted his mother, and a moment later, she was running into the room. She saw him there fighting to breathe, and she screamed. Her barely concealed fear had finally become too much for the woman, and Cole could see tears pour from her wild eyes. When he did not respond, she ran to the phone and called for an ambulance. The boy continued to writhe on the floor, coughing and choking for air. His eyes began to close, and he looked up. He saw his mother and, standing far above her, the hunched figure of the stranger.

When Cole opened his eyes next, he saw flashing red and blue lights. He was being carried on something. He saw his mother in the distance, an ambulance, and then the man again, his white eyes staring down at him. Cole felt himself slip out of consciousness again. With a jolt, the boy regained himself and opened his eyes again. He was in a new place. The room was white and bright, and Cole knew immediately that he was in a hospital. Looking down, he saw that he was no longer wearing his pajamas but instead a starchy blue hospital gown. There were tubes coming out of his nose, and air flew through them. On his arm, the boy could see an I.V. stuck into his flesh. There were people above him, all cast in shadows by the fluorescent overhead lights. He saw two men in surgical masks and, between them, unmoving, the stranger. The sound of ragged breathing was overpowering, but Cole could just make out voices above the din. He heard his mother and Doctor Mendelson. They were talking, and the boy heard the doctor say that he had to be intubated. Cole did not understand what that meant, but it didn’t matter. He tried to call out to his mother. He had something he had to tell her. Cole couldn’t manage to speak, but he did get out a soft groan.
At the sound of her son’s voice Cole’s mother ran to him immediately. She ran to him and grasped his shoulders like she was drowning, and he was driftwood. Cole felt His mother cling to him as she had never done before. She ran her trembling fingers through his hair with care as she stared into his eyes through freely running tears. His mother whispered to him, “It’s okay, Cole, your real sick, but the doctors are gonna give you medicine and make you better, ok?” He was now certain that it wasn’t true. He was not going to be ok, and he understood that now, but it didn’t matter. He had something to tell his mother. Cole stared past his mother up at the stranger, his white eyes flashing in the light. He understood now, but he could not speak. One of the men in masks said something to him about counting down from ten, but the boy couldn’t answer. He knew who the stranger was now, and he wanted to tell his mother, who now cradled him against her chest. He couldn’t speak. It was too late. The man in the surgical mask began to count slowly, and the boy felt cold liquid shoot from the IV into his arm. “Ten…Nine…Eight…” Cole could feel his grasp on himself slipping, and he stared up at the hungry white eyes one last time.

It was all too late.

Credit: B. Boethius

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