His vision tunnels to little pinpricks. Everything begins to buzz around him.
She holds his arm up.
He knows it’s his arm.
He can feel her fingers on him.
He can see her fingers on him.
He thinks, This is a dream. This is a dream. This is a dream.
Because the arm she’s holding, his arm, is nothing but skin and bone. The joints of his wrist are jutting out sharply, and the skin on his forearm looks pale and paper-thin. He’s always been a big guy, always been muscular. This can’t be his arm. This stick covered in skin cannot be his arm.
She’s working it up, pulling the arm farther, bending it at the elbow, and he sees his bicep, and it’s small enough that she’d be able to fit her whole hand around it, and the skin is sagging, the deteriorated muscle is sagging, and it’s—
Mike Frazier begins to scream.
HE’S STILL screaming when more people rush in, the therapist having dropped his arm back onto the bed, then hit a button on the wall. She’s wide-eyed again at his hoarse cries, but he can’t stop, he can’t stop, because he needs to wake from this nightmare, he needs to—
He sees a needle and sees it flash down toward his hand. There’s a thin tube stretching out from his wrist and a small orange cylinder fitted into his skin. The plunger is depressed into the line from his wrist, and a gray wave begins to roll over him, but not before he sees the markings on his skin, just below his hand, black lines etched into his skin: 4221552082.
He’s pulled under the wave.
EVERYTHING IS hazy after that.
For a very long time.
HIS MOUTH is dry the next time he’s aware. He has more clarity about him, thoughts not as muddled. He’s able to put an order to them, and he thinks, I must have drunk too much last night. I hope Sean’s not too angry with me.
He opens his eyes.
He’s still in the white room.
The machines are still around him.
There’s a window off to the right. He can see the orange and red leaves on a tree, but not much more. The sunlight looks weak, like it’s still early.
He thinks, I don’t know where I am.
There’s a low-level panic running through him, but it’s almost negligible, and it doesn’t overwhelm him, no matter how much he expects it to. It’s being held back by something, and he doesn’t know what.
He tries to get up.
He can’t.
His fingers move. And his toes move. He can feel them. But he doesn’t have the strength to lift his head. Can’t get his body to do what he’s telling it to do.
“Your muscles have atrophied,” a voice says. “It was expected.”
He jerks his head to the left.
Sitting next to his bed (because it is a bed, with rails on either side and wires jutting out of it and him, and his throat starts to close, because what is this, what is this) is a man.
He’s a slight man. An old man. His skin is wrinkled, and he has tufts of thin white hair jutting up from a pale skull. His eyes are sunken in their sockets, and he’s hunched over in a wheelchair. But his eyes are clear, and he’s watching Mike with a calculating expression that he doesn’t know what to do with.
“What?” Mike croaks out.
“Muscles. They have memory, in a way. It’s the repetition of daily life. The more you train them, the more they expect from you.” He sighs. His hands are shaking in his lap. Mike doesn’t think it’s from nerves or fear. “When you don’t give them what they expect, they fade. It’s called disuse atrophy. There’s nothing that can be done to stop it.” He smiles grimly. His lips are thin and his teeth are large. “Whether it be from trauma or disease or some other outside factor. The brain is the same way. If it’s not used, it can waste. However, there are times when, even if it’s used to its fullest extent, that something can happen. Something that makes it begin to fade. Begin to break apart. Become soft. It’s not disuse that causes it, but it atrophies, just the same. Trauma. Psychosis. Disease.” He snorts. “It’s really rather frightening how fragile it is for how much it actually does.”