The Hollow Man

EYES

Robby Bustamante is dying. The deaf, blind, retarded child slides in and out of coma like some sightless amphibian moving from water to air without finding sustenance in either element.

The child is so terribly and obviously damaged that some nurses find reasons to avoid his room, while others spend extra time there, tending to the dying child while trying to ease his pain through the sheer unsensed fact of their presence. On the rare occasions when Robby rises close to consciousness and the monitors above his bed register something other than REM-state dream sleep, the boy moans fitfully and paws at the bed covers, splayed fingers and stiff splints scratching at the sheets.

Sometimes the nurses gather round then, rubbing the child’s brow or increasing the dosage of painkiller in his IV drip, but no amount of touching or medicine stops Robby’s mewling and fevered scrabbling. It is as if he is searching for something.

He is searching for something. Robby is desperately trying to find his teddy bear, the one companion he has had through the years. His tactile friend. His solace in the endless night punctuated only with pain.

When Robby is semiconscious, he rolls and scrabbles, searching the bedclothes and wet sheets for his teddy bear. He cries out in his sleep, the falsetto croon moaning down dark hospital corridors like the cry of the damned.

There is no teddy bear. His mother and “Uncle” had tossed it and the rest of the child’s possessions in the back of the car on the night they left, planning to get rid of them at the first Dumpster they passed.

Robby turns and moans and claws at the sheets during those rare times he rises toward consciousness, searching for his teddy, but those times become fewer and fewer and finally cease.