Chapter 23
30.
 Hugh Milton completed a full day's work with Max and Fritz. Hugh felt a little fatigued at times, but he dutifully stayed away from the cooler of beer. He had a slight lunch of cottage cheese and toast, followed by an apple and a banana. They had maybe another day to go before the roof was done and the big payoff came along. Annie would be very happy, Hugh thought as he drove home in his pickup.
They had a light supper, and he made love to her after dark to candle light and soft rock music. They were both passionate and went a long way. They fell asleep in each other's arms.
After midnight, Hugh woke up and realized immediately that something was terribly wrong. He looked at his hands and arms, which seemed yellow. Staggering to the bathroom, he looked into a flushed face with huge bags around haunted eyes. What could this possibly be? He didn't want to alarm Annie, so he wrapped himself in a blanket, took a quart of fresh spring water, and sat alone outside on the balcony. He was shivering and uneasy, almost to the point of panicking. Did he have a fever? Was this some weird flu?
Dozing on and off, he felt as if the world were spinning. His body felt as though it were undulating, and it was beginning to hurt. His joints hurt—classic flu, he thought—and his bones seemed sore. His back in particular was sore, and it hurt no matter which way he squirmed. He found a bottle of aspirin in the medicine cabinet, and took a handful. All the while, he remembered feeling sick the other night, and then miraculously better the next day. Maybe, with luck, he'd wake up from this nightmare and feel fine in the morning.
It didn't turn out that way. At dawn, Hugh was writhing in agony. Both sides of his middle back felt as if they were on fire. His thinking was clouded, and his body felt as if it were reacting to some poison. It was a weird, painful, scary complex of feelings he had never had before. Max and Fritz stopped by, asked Annie if he were coming today, and wished their best condolences when she said he couldn't.
Annie decided to skip her class at State that morning, and called in sick for her hairdressing job. Around noon, she helped Hugh stagger down the stairs to her car, and she took him to the Emergency Room at UCSD Medical Center in Hillcrest. There, he sat in a wheelchair for hours, while all sorts of other patients swirled about. Some were mental patients. Others were prisoners heavily chained, escorted by Sheriff's Deputies from the County Jail. Others were heroin addicts shivering and sweating as they writhed in their chairs waiting for intake. There were alcoholics, druggies, all kinds of sick people, and Hugh did not receive top priority at first. Then a doctor came and looked at Hugh in a closed area. The doctor took his temp and other indicators, seemed to panic, and had Hugh put in quarantine. The medical staff had absolutely no idea what was going on with their patient. Hugh was becoming delirious by now. Distantly he heard Annie's voice—he still recognized her—as she argued and pleaded with important people. An ambulance came and removed Hugh to a place somewhere with lots of clean white bed sheets where he could be observed closely without compromising anyone else if he were infectious.
Hugh overheard, dimly, a conversation: "His organs are starting to fail. We have comprehensive results back from Lab, and they show his kidneys and liver are failing at a rapid rate. An increasing rate, in fact. This man is desperately ill and failing fast. So what's going on? Why is this happening?"
"Mushrooms," said a wise voice. "He must have eaten some mushrooms. He has all the classic symptoms of mycotoxicosis." It was a man, Hugh could detect through the walls of delirium in which he now hovered. It was a man, a doctor man, a man perhaps talking to Annie or to some other doctor. What have we, doctor? A white rabbit, a hookah pipe, a tunnel to another world.
"Renal failure," said another man somewhere nearby in the darkness. "His liver is also sliding into failure, and his heart can't be too far behind."
Hugh loved Annie and was sure she would do well in teaching school. That meant they would have a marble sanctuary together on a green hill in sunshine. It meant that they would be married soon, and that would make her happy. He only hoped he would not forget to attend the wedding. He had an urgent situation going on with this tunnel that was trying to pull him down its long pleasant slope toward a light.
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Copyright © 2014 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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