Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Vol 4

206 BEHIND THE WALL OF SLEEP

(This is the sequel to Daron's Guitar Chronicles: Vols 1-3, which should be read first. You'll find that complete work on Wattpad here:  http://www.wattpad.com/story/49160)

When we got home I slept for a week.

I’m not exaggerating… much. The last show was in Seattle and we were on a red eye back to Boston, so it was around 8:30 in the morning after being up all night when I actually dragged myself into bed. I didn’t even take my clothes off. I didn’t even realize I laid a guitar case down right next to me in bed until I woke up when I kicked it onto the floor some hours later. No damage was done–the futon I slept on was on the floor anyway. I made a mental note to buy some furniture. Then I went back to sleep.

Somewhere in there I got up, had take-out pizza with Chris, and then I went back to sleep. I slept straight through until the next afternoon. Had a shower, made a phone call, ate a little something, went back to bed.

So it went for a while–I wasn’t keeping track.

I have no idea which day it was, then, when Carynne burst into my room in hysterics.

“Daron! Get dressed!”

My head was under a pillow at the time and it took me a few moments to unbury myself and sit up. “What happened?”

“You tell me! This isn’t normal.”

“What isn’t normal?” I was thinking she was trying to tell me about some problem of hers that she needed help with, or maybe I was half in a dream where she was trying to fix a car or something…?

“I’m taking you directly to a doctor. Holy crap.”

I rubbed my eyes and yawned. “Why?”

She began throwing clothes at me and cursing. Okay, I got the message: the message that she was not going to leave me alone until I did what she said. I pulled on a pair of jeans and changed my shirt and then went into the bathroom.

She harangued me from outside the door. “I am going to kill you if you’re really sick.”

“That’s very touching,” I said, but I doubt she could hear me over the water running.

She dragged me to a health center I hadn’t been to before, just outside Kenmore Square. “This place must be hell to get to when the Red Sox are playing.”

“Shut up,” she said, as she pulled the car, a cute red hatchback I also hadn’t seen before, into the parking garage.

Apparently when I hadn’t been paying attention, she and Digger had gone out and gotten us health insurance. She had my insurance card and everything. It said “Daron Marks” on it. I decided not to care. We settled in the waiting room at Internal Medicine, which I kept reading as “Infernal Medicine.”

“Are you going to come into the exam room with me?” I asked as I leafed through a dog-eared copy of People without actually reading any of it.

“Do you think I should, or do you think you can handle at least that much?” She really looked stressed out.

“This whole thing was your idea,” I pointed out. “What am I supposed to say? Hey, doc, I’ve been sleeping a lot? It’s only been a week and I feel fine.”

“Just let him check you out, all right?”

A nurse came to the door just then and called my first name.

She led me to a small room, took my temperature (normal), my blood pressure (“low, that’s good”), and then told me to get undressed and put a gown on and wait.