I Know A Guy's In A Coma

He’s the husband of a friend of my wife.
And well, one day he got a fever.
Two days later he’s in the hospital
in a coma
the doctors put him in.
Said they had to do it
to prevent another seizure like the one
made his wife call the paramedics in the first place.
And it’s difficult with someone like that, they said,
to wake him up at all.
It must happen slowly—sometimes a matter
of days just to let the body acclimate, like a
diver rising out of the depths of the sea
while avoiding the bends.
So he’s far away, asleep, and he’s been like this
for a couple of months.
In those months, his muscles atrophied
and his wife had to get a second job. Her father’s
this guy’s boss (the one in the coma)
at a liquor store he owns.
But he refused to give the wife
(his daughter)
the incapacitated man’s wages.
Instead, he would give her
and her children
food in the form of meals at his house
and just about anything else they needed
other than money itself.
Long as they come over, he says, to keep him
company. He’s a widower. He has trouble
with things like laundry. When he comes out of it,
she tells her father,
he’s not gonna be able to go right back to work.
That’s alright, says the father.
And she says, he’s not gonna be able to make up
the time’s lost, with you or anyone.
He might never be the same. The doctors say they
do not know.
That’s also alright, says the father.
He’s not gonna have anything, even if he’s not a vegetable.
We used up everything we saved.
The father says, I’ll take care of you. When
he’s ready to walk, he’s welcome back.
This talk went on a few more months
while the doctors tinkered with dosages
to deal with his newfangled epilepsy.
They’d do one, wait
while he came out of the coma, see how it worked.
Usually, he’d wake up then nearly kill himself
with a seizure. Well, they’d figure, that one didn’t work.
Put him back under and down he’d go.
When we went to see him he didn’t even look alive.
His muscles retained water so he had this
deathly bloated look about his face. His skin
was gray and waxy. His body
approximated a real version of himself
meanwhile you thought
you were looking into some queer nightmare of a person.
He likes hearing his friends talk to him, his wife told us.
He knows you’re here.
My wife consoled her as she cried.
I’d but met the man one time
around a bar pool table.
Now here he was,
in a coma wanting me to talk to him.
I said a few things, I don’t remember what.
How odd it is, I kept thinking, that this has
happened to this man.
What is it like for these people who get put into comas?
Who have no chance to cover their tracks, to consider
the past and the dark future, to attest to god
some good they’d done?
What was it like to skim barely
the highest, most inhospitable, incomprehensible
altitude of life, and hear the
goings on
of your life carried out, shepherded
by other folks as if through
the water and glass of a deep sea aquarium?
What will it be like
to wake up for him, if they ever wake him up
successfully, wake up
with some semblance of peace his body has finally allowed, and ask
those standing, waiting there, looking at you:
you did what?