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ALEK
Alek pushed up with his good hand and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He nearly fell forward onto the floor, but caught himself just in time by wedging his casted arm into the gap of the bed rail. A lightning bolt of pain shot up his arm, but he didn’t care.
He had to follow Ian.
Before he could muster the strength to stand, the telltale dinging alarms and murmuring voices grew loud as the door slid open behind him. Had Ian returned?
“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” The brain surgeon—whose name escaped him—rushed over and lifted his legs up, shoving them back onto the hospital bed, a disapproving scowl on her face as she continued to berate him in Bulgarian. “The last thing you need is to fall on your face. You can’t get out of bed without help.”
“Then help me.”
She put both hands on her hips. “If you think I’ll be able to hold you up when you fall, you have more brain damage than I originally suspected. You look terrible. Why aren’t you taking the pain medicine?”
“I don’t need it.” Alek rested his head back on the pillow and shielded his eyes with his hand. The sun was too bright outside the window. It made his head throb.
Her eyebrows rose. “Really? You look like the type to enjoy a bit of legalized heroin.”
“I’m more of a cocaine kind of guy.”
“Too bad. We’re fresh out of that.”
Alek pressed his lips together to hide his smile.
In all seriousness, the idea of accepting hospital-grade narcotics wasn’t as appealing as it normally would have been. Aside from the even-more-vivid-than-usual nightmare his last dose had conjured, concussion-induced vertigo made him seasick at baseline, and the narcotics only made the nausea worse. He'd thrown up once already, and the force with which he vomited made him feel like his head was going to explode.
Besides, the pain was a rather fitting penance.
The doctor sat down in the chair Ian had vacated and looked over at the piano keyboard. “A little bird told me there was no music overnight. Why didn’t you play?”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“The keys don’t make sense when I look at them and I can't read music anymore. I’ve forgotten all the songs I know. I’ve lost the music I composed. When I hear sounds, I usually see colors and images, but now it’s all dark.”
She crossed one of her legs over the other and brought her hand to her chin. “Has anyone ever told you that you have synesthesia?”
“No,” Alek lied.
Early on, Alek’s uncle had explained that the way his senses tangled together until he couldn’t isolate one without tugging on the other was different from how most others experienced the world. It was an uncommon gift shared by some of history’sgreatest artists—musical and otherwise—and often credited for some of the magic in their craft.
“Synesthesia is when you experience one of your five senses simultaneously with one or more of the others. For example, if you think of your partner, you might smell his cologne, or if you hear a sound, you might see a color in your mind. Does that sound familiar?”
Alek nodded and sneaked a glance at her badge.Dr. Modorovic. The picture on her badge was faded and she looked about ten years younger, her black hair smooth and with far less gray, the crow’s feet and smile lines shallower than they were now.
“I want you to try to remember your earliest memory of the piano,” she said.
Alek could already smell the wisteria, feel the wind blowing gently against his face, fireflies blinking in the dark. He stopped himself before he got to the part where his uncle turned to him and smiled, almost in slow motion when it played back as a memory.
“I was five and I was watching my uncle’s hands move over the piano keys. I don’t see how this is going to help. Where can I smoke?”
“I’ll have my resident write an order for a nicotine patch.”
“I take it alcohol is off the menu too?”
“Afraid so. How much did you drink before?”
“A glass or two of vodka.”
