Chapter 17: A Wind of Change

[pascal_curious]

When Nervous Subjects woke up, he was face down on the floor, his left cheek resting on the cold stone tiles. He felt like his brain was swimming around inside his head, repeatedly and painfully bumping into the inside of his skull.

Originating from somewhere very near him, Nervous heard a slow drip. It was then that he realized his pants were wet. He hoped desperately that he hadn’t peed himself.  A quick sniff of the air was enough to put his mind at ease until he could investigate further.

It would be embarrassing to be found in this predicament. He strained to hear if there was anyone nearby before he opened his eye. There was no one nearby as far as he could tell. Confident that he was alone, he opened his eyes and surveyed the area around him as far as his peripheral vision would permit. Satisfied, he breathed a sigh of relief.

 

 

Everything hurt.  If it were possible to be struck by a freight train and survive, he imagined that this is what it must feel like. He slowly clambered to his knees. Even the slightest movement was agony. He managed to get upright and took a moment to try to remember why it was he had been unconscious on the floor. 

 

He was standing in what Loki called his “Laboratory”. It was simply a room where Loki housed his various experiments and inventions. Nervous looked around him and spotted Loki’s latest invention. This contraption was the reason Nervous had been on the floor, out cold. It resembled a poorly constructed Jacob’s ladder set into a washbasin of water. The rods sticking out of the wash tub were connected via wires to a control panel built into an old work bench. On the control panel were numerous lights and a switch that controlled the power source: a stack of old batteries from Circe’s Porsche. Nervous was unclear on what the purpose of this invention was. Loki had told him, but as usual, the explanation had been in terms too advanced for Nervous to understand. Rather than have to endure Loki’s jibes about being stupid, Nervous had simply nodded and gone along with the experiment. 

The last thing he remembered was the sensation of having his bones set on fire and his muscles flash frozen stiff as electricity coursed through his body. He had looked up to see Loki, apparently having become bored with his experiment, flicking a crumb of toast off of his sweater.  That was when everything had gone fuzzy.

 

Nervous stretched his arms and legs, the pain was starting to lessen, but it was still enough to cause him to wince with discomfort every time he moved. He shuffled off toward the bathroom, his soaked sandals making a squelching sound as he went. He looked behind him and saw that he had left a trail of water behind him. Circe would bitch if he didn’t clean it up, but he didn’t care.

 

Nervous looked at himself in the bathroom mirror. There were no marks on his face. He must not have hit his head when he fell. At a loss for an explanation for his pounding headache, other than the general trauma he had been subjected to by Loki’s machine, he opened the medicine cabinet and took out an orange prescription bottle. He shook two of the round white pills into his hand and threw them into his mouth. He followed them with a few gulps of water from the faucet. He returned the pill bottle and shut the cabinet door. 

He suddenly became acutely aware that he was very itchy. His whole head, in addition to throbbing, was fiercely itchy. Nervous knew that taking too many Percocet would make him itchy, but not the instant he swallowed them. It usually took twenty minutes or so until the itching started. 

He ran his hand through his mohawk, ruffling the stiffly gelled hairs back and forth. This brought him some relief, until he pulled his hand away from his head and discovered a clump of his own hair in his palm. Hairy palms, he mused. He knew a joke about hairy palms, but couldn’t quite remember it. He ran his other hand over his head and produced the same result. He knew that he shouldn’t be shedding massive clumps of hair, but he wasn’t quite sure why. His brain didn’t seem to be working correctly. (Not that it ever worked all that well to begin with, he lamented.) He found the clods of hair in his hands vaguely interesting. In a daze, he dropped the hair from his hands into the toilet and pushed the lever down. He watched them swirl around the inside of the bowl before they disappeared down the vortex in the middle. When the toilet stopped running there were a few rogue hairs sticking to the inside of the bowl. It reminded him of the last time he had eaten corn on the cob.

 

Feeling like he was stoned, Nervous shed his clothes and stepped into the shower. He wasn’t sure how long he spent in the shower. It could have been 5 minutes or five hours. The passage of time wasn’t something he was able to measure very well, but he had noticed that the water started getting cold and collecting around his ankles. There seemed to be a lot of hair clogging the drain. Circe would bitch if he didn’t clean it out, but he didn’t really care.

 

When he stumbled out of the shower, Nervous was pink as a piglet from excessive scrubbing and overly hot water. He stepped over his pile of clothing and tufts of hair that had clung to the neck of his t-shirt when he pulled it over his head. He stood before the mirror once again, trying to understand what it was he was seeing in his reflection. He wished his brain would stop sloshing around; it was making it hard for him to focus.

 

“Shit,” he muttered.

 

Every bit of hair had disappeared from his head. Even his eyebrows were gone. He imagined what they must have looked like going down the shower drain, like two little crescents floating down the length of the bathtub. He wished that he had seen them. He would have waved goodbye. He had an inexplicable desire to laugh at the thought of his tufty eyebrows swirling away, down the tub drain.

 

 

He ran his hand over his newly bald head. It was perfectly smooth and shiny, just like the coffee tables after Circe had dusted them with Pledge. He felt naked without any hair on his head. He looked down to see a puddle of water collecting around his feet. It was then that he realized he felt naked because he was naked. He pulled a towel from the rod behind him and wrapped it around his waist.

 

Slipping and stumbling on the wet tile floor, Nervous managed to exit the bathroom, jamming his shoulder into the door frame on his way out. 

He blundered down the hall and into the kitchen. The Percocet were clearly not working as advertised. Obviously,he thought, what he needed to enhance their effectiveness was a drink. 

He yanked open the refrigerator door and held onto it tightly for added stability while he searched for what he desired. After searching for what seemed like hours he finally spotted what he was looking for, right in from of him on the top shelf. 

He took the can of Guiness and slammed the fridge door closed; the contents of the fridge clinked and jingled with the force of the slamming door. He shuffled over to the table and plopped himself into a chair. Circe would bitch at him for drinking Loki’s beer, but he really didn’t care.

 

Something has to change, he thought as he sipped his Guiness. He was an adult now. There was no reason to meekly submit to Loki’s abuse any longer. He was a man, and he needed to act like one. Yes, something definitely needed to change,and Nervous was determined to make that change happen.

 

 

 

Comments

[madame-ugly.livejournal.com]

I laughed at Nervous wanting to wave goodbye to his eyebrows (and his thinking they'd fall off and still look like full brows instead of individual hairs).

[pascal-curious.livejournal.com]

I wasn't even enebriated when I wrote most of this. I have no idea what was going on inside of my little pea brain.

I am glad it made you laugh. It made me laugh when I wrote it.