Wings & Hearts

The cough that began soon after the first gig had not gone away by the third, nor the thirteenth; and Jyrki’s full-body-dry-heave of a cough started to gain the attention and concern of people other than myself. I had thought, at first, that I was just being facetious, that the occasional wheezing and phlegm-moving cough would go away after a while. I was within hearing distance when Ville confronted Jyrki about it, telling him that it would only get worse and that he should just go see a doctor, but Jyrki stubbornly told Ville he was fine and he would be going nowhere near any hospital.

So life continued on as usual. Well, as close to usual as it could as the wheezing grew more frequent; Jyrki had even experienced shortness of breath in the bedroom so severe that he had been forced to roll over like a turtle on its back and quit. Jyrki. Quit. Sex. That was really cause for concern - mainly because I wasn‘t completely comfortable with the act and Jyrki wasn‘t the type to take a rain check if I was willing.

The next morning I made it a point to get up before he did; the scent of coffee was enough to draw Ville out of his room so I could tell him about the episode over a cigarette and two large mugs of black brew. I watched as his eyes widened with concern and narrowed with anger - Jyrki was unreasonably stubborn about doctors because of some trying event when he was young, neither Ville nor I could understand the sentiment due to the fact that doctor’s visits were so damned necessary to us. Ville had suffered from asthma so severe that most animals were off-limits since he was a child, and I had grown up trusting my doctors and what they had to say.

“He needs to get to a fucking doctor,” He murmured after I had concluded, a cigarette poised between his lips. There was no joking in his voice; there was very little I could draw humor from that cold January morning.

“No kidding,” I sighed into my coffee before I took a long draught. Ville pulled a black beanie hat over his brown curls - there was nothing more to say than what we already had, and there was almost no way to get Jyrki to the hospital without pushing him down a flight of stairs and calling an ambulance for him - and act I was ashamed to admit I had considered. After a few moments of silence, I took a breath of smoke and asked when Ville’s new band’s next gig was on the exhale - in much fewer words.

“Ah, next Tuesday we have one, and then another on Friday. Are you going to come to either?” His coffee cup was empty, like my own; I swiped them both from the counter and began to fill them from the pot on the stove as I answered.

“Well, probably not the Tuesday but -” I paused and turned my head toward Jyrki’s bedroom door where I had heard a loud cough followed by a thump.

One of the hefty ceramic mugs crashed to the floor - it must have bounced, I had dropped those things a hundred times while drunk and not one of the set of four had ever broken - as Ville and I raced down the hall toward the door. I never knew how long that damned hallway was. He yanked open the door just in time for me to pass through, I would have crashed right through it if he hadn’t. Mingled shouts of his name melted into curses as I stumbled over the mess of dirty laundry on the floor - hadn’t I just cleaned this damned mess yesterday? - to the side of the bed where Jyrki lay, facedown on the floor.

“Jyrki!” I pried his shoulders off the floor with much more strength than I had ever mustered. “Jyrki please wake up!” A shake of his shoulders set his eyelids aflutter. “Jyrki?” Gingerly, I touched a finger to his lips - a black substance dribbled from the corner of his mouth, a substance I knew to be blood but was too frightened to admit. “Ville call an ambulance!” The sound of his bare feet drummed down the hallway as I clutched my lover to my chest; I was lost in a sea of adrenaline and fear as I called his name and choked back tears.

“Please, Jyrki, ei vittun saatana, Jyrki!” Perhaps the strong language I had uttered startled him into rousing, but finally those icy blue eyes opened just a hair - I could barely see their color for they were merely slits in Jyrki’s pale face. He opened his mouth as if to speak, but only a wheezing gasp emitted from between his blood-covered lips - for a moment, I felt as if we were performing a scene from the proposed sequel to The Lost Boys.

“Sinikka! I called the ambulance, they are on their way; they want us to try to sit him up, and make sure nothing’s blocking his airways.” Ville was at my side, helping to lift Jyrki even though he couldn’t have been much stronger than I was for all of the muscles on his body. Together, we leaned him against the side of the bed; and as Ville anxiously paced, awaiting the ring of the ambulance, I supported Jyrki’s black-haired head and brushed the long strands out of his face. The question of weather we should try to dress Jyrki had been asked - Ville rationalized that they would prefer us not to mess with him so much - but we simply pulled a blanket around his broad shoulders to cover his briefs and the thick wool socks he always wore to bed. I realized I didn’t quite know when he had gotten dressed, when I had left Jyrki’s bed he had still been wrapped in the comforter.

Ville and I had managed to talk our way into sharing the jump seat when the ambulance arrived; normally, one of us would have been left behind. It had been more than slightly unnerving, watching the paramedics push a tube into Jyrki’s nose and connect it to an oxygen tank and squeeze the IV bag after injecting it with some sort of drug to open his airways. We arrived with Jyrki at the hospital, and managed to keep pace with the gurney until it hit the doors labeled ‘Emergency Care’ - and were told by a stern, overweight nurse that we must stay behind in the waiting room.

Let the pacing begin.

I sat with my hands clasped between my knees, wishing I had my cigarettes with me. I wouldn’t have been able to smoke them in the waiting room, but there was a small room off to the left of where I sat where one could spark up. Ville paced back and forth in front of me to the rhythm of “Billie Jean,” the song that played over the speaker - absently, I wondered if he would randomly break out into song and dance. After a while, Ville’s rhythmic pacing grew tiring, and I focused on the badly-dubbed episode of Charlie’s Angles for as long as I could manage before I began to fidget again.

“Do you suppose there’s coffee around here?” I paused and took a sharp breath. “Never mind. I don’t think I could wander around until I find out about Jyrks anyway,” Ville had stopped pacing, and pierced me with his bright green eyes.

“No. Coffee would be an excellent idea. We can’t just sit here and rot,” He turned on his heel and directed the lady behind the counter as to where we would be, and left in search of the nearby cafeteria.

A half an hour of wandering later and Ville and I were pouring ourselves cups of the worst black coffee I had ever drank in a gloomy-looking cafeteria. As I sipped from my cup, I stared absently (I had been very absent since the ambulance ride, apparently) out the window into the gloomy Finnish winter, noting that snow had started to fall yet again. I leaned against the buffet the coffee machine rested on as Ville painstakingly filled his cup - the machine was extremely slow at producing the life-giving liquid. I almost didn’t notice the little redheaded nurse until she was right on top of us.

“Ville,” I tugged on his jacket’s sleeve as the girl stood behind him, waiting for both of our attention.

“You two are with Mr. Linnankivi?” She asked, when Ville had finally turned. He and I exchanged exasperated glances, and I nodded. Good God, it was nearly noon, I hadn’t had a cigarette or a full cup of Joe, and I was in a damned hospital - why did that make other people stupid? Shouldn’t it have been the other way around?

She determined that we really were with him, and led the pair of us down a long, stark-white hallway. I had already seen more of this hospital than I had ever wished to become familiar with, and I could definitely understand why Jyrki hated them so. I placed a hand on the reverse-tinted window and stared in - from what I could see, Jyrki was in his own room, and hooked up to an IV, an oxygen tank, a heart monitor, and some machine that I wasn’t certain the use of; his arms looked as if they were a pincushion full of needles the way the doctors had pricked his arms.

I clutched Ville’s arm in one hand, the coffee in the other as Jyrki’s doctor came out of the room, the door closed behind him and choked off the sound of artificial breathing and the beeping of the heart monitor.

“Good news, you two called us in time to save him - Jyrki was undergoing a severe Asthma attack, one that could have been brought on for any number of reasons.” The way the slimy-looking man used Jyrki’s name made me cringe - like he was talking about some small boy that wasn’t even there. “He’s going to be fine, after a few days of rest, but he’s going to have to be careful about smoke, pet dander, pollen - basically anything that might set him off until we know what it is that does trigger the attacks. Has he had a cough for a long time? Has he complained about shortness of breath?”

I found myself participating in the doctor’s study even though I didn’t really want to - I informed him about Jyrki’s cough and it’s origins in the smoky club, and how the environment he lives in was smoke-filled as well. The doctor frowned as he wrote notes on his clipboard in a manner I took to be condescending, and after a few moments, I stopped contributing.

Jyrki was asleep (I couldn’t tell if it was natural or drug-induced, and I figured it was the latter) when Ville and I finally were allowed to sit with him. The brown-haired man paced as I perched on the edge of the bed, clutching Jyrki’s hand for all it was worth - and wondering why in the hell they had left those ugly socks on him.

“Sini?” Hanna had arrived - funny, I didn’t remember Ville calling her, but he must have at some point - and was offering me a new cup of coffee, and my pack of cigarettes. “They told me he wasn’t going to wake up for a little while, so I brought you two some things.” The tiny sliver of a woman hefted an enormous bag over her shoulder. “I went to Paavo and got some of your homework, we thought you’d want to get it done.”

“Paavo’s here?” I passed the cigarettes to Ville and eagerly drank the coffee she had offered me.

“No, he couldn’t come - said something about classes.” I quirked an eyebrow. Classes, huh? Since when had he started to take classes on Saturday afternoons? Hanna caught the anger that flashed over my face. “He’s probably with Kirsi, am I right?” I winced.

“I think so. God, it’s like I don’t even know him any more,” She handed me the bag as I reached for it, and glanced worriedly at Jyrki while I began to sort through the multitude of books she had brought me. I did have quite a bit of reading to get done, and a paper to finish. “The doctor said it was an asthma attack, one of the worst he’s ever seen.”

Hanna pulled up a chair and sat beside me as I began to work on the paper - the sound of the pen scratching the paper and Ville’s pacing as he drank his coffee were the only sounds in the room aside from the oxygen tank and the heart monitor.

I had written nearly three quarters of the paper before Jyrki even stirred, and Ville sat editing its spelling errors with a red pen when he did finally wake.

Jyrki became aware of his surroundings very slowly, wanted to know where he was and why he was there, and was extremely disgusted when I finally explained it to him. But after witnessing his wheezing sleep, the three of us were more than stern when we explained to him that he was going to stay in bed until he was well again, and leave whenever the doctors told him to, and the black-haired man was too exhausted to do anything except resign himself to his fate.

Three days later I arrived after my last class of the day (the professor had enjoyed the paper I had written on the Quantum theory very much, had called it a masterpiece and had asked if I had Jyrki’s help in writing it, which was rather insulting) to help Jyrki home. His skin looked as if it were ready to slough off at any moment, his eyes were sunken into his head, and he looked quite strange in the leather jacket and jeans Ville had provided for him, but he was back to his normal self (with only a touch of wheeze) as we helped him to the metro.

“So you owe me for the other night,” He murmured into my ear as he sat beside me. Ville smoked a cigarette out the window, and I had been watching him hungrily when Jyrki had spoken and gave a start - for my dark-haired beauty, I was making a concerted effort to quit smoking.

“What do you mean, owe you?” I snapped - quitting was making me more irritable and bitchy than it was worth. “If I remember correctly, you owe me.”

Jyrki grinned wryly and kissed my cheek.

He was going to be the death of me, eventually.