The Life And Death Of Keyes

I was never sure if Stephen chose the life he lived, or if it was the only one he could have had. I still don’t know, but I’ve decided it hardly matters. He loved his life, and he died happy. Happier than most.

When I met Stephen, he was already dying. Those final stages of life were ripping through him like a knife-point, and no one knew it. In the back of our minds, perhaps we understood that living like he was, one couldn’t really last very long. Flat on his back on the bed he claimed his mother had left him before she died, connected to tubes and monitors that would regulate his blood sugar and, for the most part, keep his brain from going into shock.

I’m sure if any of us had been asked, we would have told you we didn’t see him living another five years, and we might have had the same answer if the question had even been about a single year, but the truth was none of us really thought about it. We had a phenomenon, our own little oddity to study in whichever way we wanted, to show to the world in whichever light we chose. And when he was gone, it left us all wondering just what we’d had.

We were the ones who sat in his room with pen and paper, waiting patiently sometimes and impatiently sometimes, for him to wake up. For him to look into our eyes and answer our questions. So we could write down a few choice sentences that fit our needs, nodding while he spoke but never really listening to what he said. We were the reporters, the journalists, the newsmen. We saw, we judged, we wrote. And I stopped being a part of the “we” when the rest of them left Stephen alone, and I still came to visit. They left him to die alone, and I didn’t.

I wrote a story about him. I wrote it for the kind of newspaper tabloid you see in every checkout line, the kind bought by people desperately hoping that this life offers something more than can be explained in a classroom. The story was called “Dreaming Man from Jersey Lives In Other World,” and it was the first story I ever regretted writing. Because for the first time in my career, I had a legitimate story. A real phenomenon. An experience beyond those that generally happen in the real world.

But I hammed up the story. I altered events, characters, places. I turned it into something any intelligent person would immediately see was fabricated. I turned the unbelievable reality of what I had witnessed into something completely ridiculous. I told the wrong story, when the right one could have done so much good. I told myself that that’s what the readers wanted, a story so out there it took them far away from any reality they might be trying to escape. And even though I had justified it, I still knew it was wrong. Stephen taught me something incredible, and I wasted it because I was too afraid to share who Stephen really was. Or who I really was.

I’m changing that now though.

I really hope I’m changing that now.