#tknolpat

Nolan's mom comes into the room holding her own to-go cup and Travis follows after her.

Nolan frowns at him, pointedly. Travis looks happy. He has also showered somewhere, possibly at one of the bougie RV campsites. He made sure to when he heard Nolan's mom was flying in for the surgery. Nolan did not say that he thought she maybe felt guilty, for all the times it was normal that he was in the hospital, so she didn't come.

To Nolan's mom Travis says, "Yeah, I know his discharge looks a little funky on the gauze, but it's fine, I promise! Totally great fluids."

"Hey," Nolan says to the ceiling, willing himself to pass out again or something.

"You're doing good," Travis said, patting Nolan's wrist, which burns. Nolan's mom watches this.

"Thank you for answering my questions, Travis," Nolan's mother says. "Whew. It must be nice to have a nurse in the family."

"Well," says Travis, taking his cap off to rub his hair and then putting it back on. "Not anymore, I guess. I liked learning all of it, though."

"Right. What was it you said you do now?"

Nolan freezes. He is lying still on a hospital bed so no one notices this.

Travis stands a little straighter, jaw set nervously. "I'm a carpenter, ma'am. I work for a company that offers treehouse design and build services."

Mom lights up. "Oh wow!" she says, "Like Treehouse Masters?"

Travis blinks rapidly, relaxing a touch, his charm getting room to slide back in. His hair is kind of sunbleached but his lashes are dark. His mouth is lopsided. He carried Nolan out of Otter Slide and he has been wearing the same t-shirt for three days. He seems a little shy around Nolan's mother.

"Yeah--yeah I work for Pete, actually?" Travis says, smiling hopefully.

Nolan's mom stops. "No way," she says. Over Travis's shoulder she makes wide-eyed, intent eye-contact with Nolan.

Nolan holds her gaze and does a little, barely-there nod. Her eyes narrow. So do his. They understand each other.

"Travis," she says. "Let me say--"

Nolan is saved by a nurse bustling in. "Hey Trav," he says. "Gen surg resident left her phone in a patient's room, have you seen it in here?"

"Oh, yeah let me look, hold on," Travis says. "I just gotta--"

Travis shuffles over to the bedside table and sets about fussing with something-- oh, he's taking the lid off his coffee. Travis hands it to Nolan, says, "Get it while it's hot."

Nolan avoids his mother's eyes and holds the cup under his chin and takes a big, deep breath. The coffee smell makes him feel alive, kind of, a little bit. He breathes it for a while, then leans back, tired.

"Good?" asks Travis, taking the cup back.

"S'okay," Nolan admits.

Travis nods seriously and sees his nurse friend looking, a surgeon's cell phone in hand. Nolan's mom found it.

3. Travis is like. Babe (Eastern Orthodox respectful), I know the point of monasticism is like. Being removed from the world? But your secretary is skeevy and why do you have to publish all your work thru him??? And Nolan admits that he learned Latin kind of late, because God did not see fit to give him miraculous grammar at the same time as shoving visions of the earth as a globe of water and silt and air swirling in a skin of fire, like oil burning on water up above the clouds. And Travis is like. Baby (still Eastern Orthodox respectful, though honestly the East-West schism has barely begun and Christianity looks largely the same across the board atm). I had to learn Latin for being a doctor. Mostly medical terms and stuff but I’ll transcribe. It’s not so bad (it is so bad. Latin is a punishment. But he’s got a goal right now.)

4. So Travis lightly kidnaps this internationally famous monk who writes letters to kings and sees screaming gold light and angels sometimes and is like. How do you like your gulasch, babe. Shit the Columbian trade hasn’t started yet, there’s no paprika for like 300 years. Okay so it’s not gulasch but presumably he has come up with the next best thing; it involves beer in the sauce and sauerkraut. Maybe some dumplings. He writes down what Nolan says is important to write down, no matter what, because he said he would.

His point was, no matter what his buddies who are hunting guides or fancy whitewater kayakers or Montana Forest Service think, taking a bunch of strangers with little to no winter wilderness survival experience who can’t be outright insulted or bossed around is pretty fucking dangerous. As such, Nolan is not going to get in trouble in the fucking eastern provinces. This is Ontario, for fuck’s sake.

He’s soloing his buddy’s nice Swift canoe with a little one-person tent and the sausage jerky his mom freeze-dried, also courtesy of pinterest somehow, and some rice and stuff. No gun because he’s in a Provincial Park for most of it, and the only people who can hunt here are the nation down at Golden Lake, and then usually only when the government asks them to do some culling the wolves haven’t managed over the winter.

He’s already thrown up the sausage jerky, but it took him half a day to realize it wasn’t just queasiness but a fever — probably, he has no way to tell. Nolan just has the shakes and a sharp pain in his abdomen, the bad-news kind, which meant a kind that Nolan was not already used to from his job before the snowmobile thing. It had started at his naval but moved right towards his hip, deep in his gut. He’s trying to remember which side your appendix is on.

Midafternoon in September is golden-green on the lake, which is called Otter Slide, and it’s cool and beautiful. The lake is all black water under the tree line, but swallowing the sky further out. Nolan remembers being young on the lake back home, watching boys in the shallows, watching girls pick up leeches on sticks and put them on logs, everyone’s jeans rolled up. He feels really bad. Even his sweat smells wrong. He was supposed to paddle westwards today, do an easy but long red-line portage, get further away from people.

He focuses. In the park Nolan dutifully gets campsite permits and camps in the marked spots, though not usually the actual site where he booked, so he knows there are a few other sites on the lake, marked from the water with an orange sign on a tree. They were all empty last night, Nolan gloriously alone on Otter Slide until the pain started, sudden and sharp. He hates pain that comes from nothing; he’d rather tear his rotator cuff again than get the weird senseless shit.

Someone appears on the lake: a speck of a red canoe coming from the eastern portages. Shit, he hopes they’re not booked at this campsite tonight, but they glide on to a campsite on the peninsula which earlier in the season would’ve been covered in blueberries. Maybe if Nolan ate blueberries instead of jerky he’d be okay.

It’s a man he thinks, though he can’t be sure. It’s someone who can solo a canoe just fine, which is a nice change from the paddling Nolan saw near the Outfitters on Opeongo. Nolan thinks his Otter Slide neighbor maybe looks his way, sees the Swift canoe bobbing where Nolan didn’t even haul it out last night, already feeling kind of shitty. The neighbor brings a pack up and then comes back down for the canoe, flips it expertly, walks it on his shoulders up the incline. He is not wearing a shirt. So, there, it’s not like Nolan is even fully alone. It’s midday, it’s a mild September, frost not coming for another week. Still. He’s not stupid about being in the bush. If he’s not feeling better in the morning, he’ll fucking pack out to the nearest highway.

It’s about 6PM when he wakes up scared. He thinks he can’t breathe in the tent but then it’s cold outside, gloomy under the trees but still day on the lake, sky blue-pink pastels, water welcoming black with ripples like fish scales picking up the bright dusk. Either there is something really wrong in his gut or something really bad in the fancy dried meat. Maybe they fucked it up somehow. Nolan’s mom’s friend helped. What if she fucked it up somehow. He thinks about blueberries again.

Around 6:40 the sky isn’t lighter and it’s not getting better and he realizes he’s been hunched and shivering on the dirt outside his tent, where it’s safe to wretch, for forty-five minutes that have slipped away like nothing. Okay, alright. He’s not thinking about anything, really, it’s some little animal part of him that scuttles bent-over down the smooth glacial stone towards the water. It’s good that the Swift is already in the water. He can just crawl in, an animal with something terribly wrong inside it going to its burrow. It fits around him. The water rocks.

A voice says, “Howdy,” warily. Someone’s put their bright headlamp on even though the sky is still golden pink over the lake and it’s right in Nolan’s eyes. He shuts them. He’s in his boat, for some reason, curled around his abdomen. He doesn’t know how he paddled; he’s sitting in the stern of the canoe but up by the thwart, which isn’t right at all for soloing. This guy is going to think he is so stupid. “You’re the guy in the Swift from across the way, huh?”

It’s a man’s voice, talking slow and deliberate. “You got a problem?” the guy asks carefully, but like he’s going to handle Nolan however Nolan needs to be handled. Nolan wants to laugh.

“I think,” Nolan says, trying to also be cool and deliberate. He can’t really breathe deeply anymore or the pain will make him throw up again though. “I think…” he looks up into the glaring headlight. “Someone poisoned my beef jerky. Or my appendix is doing bad.”

“Aw shit,” says the guy, and gets him out of the canoe and into a tent, a process which means Nolan nearly pukes on the guy’s books twice. He’s got a shirt on now, the guy. It smells like sweat and campfire, which is not a nice smell, but it’s exactly like Nolan smells. It’s a two-person tent being used as a single, and the guy switches on a little solar lamp that casts a blueish light over everything. Nolan hadn’t realized it was getting dark.

“Do you have a thermometer?” Nolan mutters. “I just want to know if I have a fever.”

“Buddy, I think we can bypass the thermometer. Can you show me where it hurts the worst.”

“Do you have one though,” Nolan says.

“...Yes,” the guy says.

Nolan nods, feeling sweat break out on his upper lip. “Cool,” he says. His hair is plastered all over his face. Maybe he should do something about that? “It’s about here.” He gestures.

The guy nods. “Alright. I’m going to do something that’s going to suck, and I just need you to tell me if when I let go it hurts more or less, okay?”

“Can I take my temperature first.”

The guy stares. His mouth is actually a little parted. His hair looks like it’s been flattened under a toque for a week and his stubble is gross. Nolan likes the way his teeth glint with his spit.

“Yeah,” he says. “I’ve got it, hold on.” He fishes around in a plastic bag — like a grocery bag — that seems to contain his toiletries, which he had to fish out of a drybag that he appears to be using as a pillow. Nolan eyes the rest of the plastic bag and wonders if Pepto Bismol could help him now.

The guy sees him looking and says, “Hey, look, I get heartburn. It’s—right, thermometer, I’ve got you, I’ve got you, don’t look at me like that.” He takes the little plastic cover off the thermometer for Nolan. It feels like a man lighting Nolan’s cigarette. He opens his mouth and the guy — coachable — carefully pops it in. “Put it, uh, beneath your tongue,” the guy says.

Nolan opens his mouth to demonstrate. The guy looks a little wide-eyed, but he looks.

The thing that was going to suck does indeed suck. The guy places his hand on Nolan’s side, over the worst of it, and presses down a little. Nolan assumes this is the sucking part until the guy lets up the pressure and says, “Sorry—sorry— okay, better or—aw, shit,” as Nolan grunts around a scream and bites down on the thermometer hard enough to crack the case, but not break it.

It trills happily, an odd sound when he’s been in the woods for fifteen days with his phone on airplane mode. Oh, his phone. Right.

“Worse when I let go?” the guy asks tentatively. “Not to uh, assume there buddy, but uh,”

“Worse,” Nolan says, letting the thermometer tumble out of his mouth to talk. The guy picks it up without hesitating even though it’s covered in Nolan’s saliva.

“37.9, mild fever there baby, good call,” the guy says, and Nolan nods, satisfied. He’s lying on his back and wheezing. “Also I think you totally have appendicitis.”

*

Apparently the wait time at the Whitley Bay ER is usually minimum two hours, even if you get there at 5AM on what is apparently a Tuesday. The guy, whose name became Travis a couple hundred meters through the first night-black portage to Lake Opeongo with Nolan’s Swift — “It is so much lighter, we’re taking your fancy canoe” — talked to a few people when they got in and suddenly Nolan had an IV in his hand and someone taking him in for imaging.

“I’ll do your paperwork,” Travis had said as Nolan boggled and was wheeled away.

“You don’t know my name,” Nolan told him.

“Baby, I know your name,” Travis had said. Nolan narrowed his eyes. “You told me, I promise.” Travis said. “I promise.”

He had said that a lot, over the night, his hand on Nolan’s arm on his good side. There were three portages to Lake Opeongo. The stars had throbbed through the pines and both of them had forgotten to be unbothered by the concept of black bears and were fucking terrified anytime something moved in the big black woods of quiet Ontario, because Nolan was a small hurt thing.

“I promise,” Travis said, “I promise.” In the distance, very far off, wolves were beginning their autumn calling, and Travis had promised lots of shit. Between portages Nolan had laid in the belly of the canoe, rocked like a child. Even when he retched over the gunnel a couple times, Travis never so much as let the canoe tip.

*

He is woken up to take antibiotics. He still smells very strongly of campfire and clothes he has not changed in five days.

There is a pack of grocery store blueberries on the bedside table, and also Travis. He’s in a new outfit, clean clothes over unshowered man.

“I went to Walmart,” Travis says proudly. He must have bought the blueberries there, and the clothes. His shirt is advertising an anime. Nolan does not think Travis knows this. Maybe he can convince him to watch it. “They wouldn’t let me sleep in here and it’s only like an hour to Huntsville. One way.”

Nolan stares at him.

“You doing better, babe?” Travis says, unbothered.

“No,” Nolan says pointedly, scowling. He is scheduled for surgery.

“You feeling better than when you showed up on my doorstep telling me you’d been poisoned by wild mushrooms in your beef jerky recipe, and then we spent all night packing out to my pickup at the Opeongo put-in? You were a trooper, babe. You did so good. Your appendix was so burst, I saw the pics.”

Nolan frowns. “I don’t think there are mushrooms in there. There could be though…”

“Let’s not go back down the mushroom road unless we have to,” Travis suggests, a little hastily. Nolan does not remember this part very well.

It’s silent for a minute. Nolan wonders if he can get Travis to feed in one blueberry or if the nurse would know.

“How’d you know it was appendicitis? You’re not a doctor,” Nolan challenges. “What do you do.”

Travis blinks, lights up a bit, dims again as he apparently decides to cut down on the explanation. It’s fascinating to watch. Travis picks at one of his cuticles and says,

“Yeah! Well, I didn’t know for sure, man, but it was that or something else worth getting checked out, so. What I do. Not much work around here, but uh I’ve done a few things. Nowadays— okay, you ever heard of a show called Treehouse Masters?” He looks so hopeful, wide-eyed in his Attack on Titan t-shirt and scruffy stubble. “They stopped airing it a while back, but….” Travis lets the sentence trail away, gesturing like he can stuff the meaning into the air around Nolan’s head.

“No,” Nolan says avidly, and watches hungrily as Travis deflates. He needs to text his mom. He needs to tell her about Travis from Treehouse Masters.

“Okay, forget that— I’m a carpenter, or whatever.” Cabinetry specialty? Nolan does not ask. “But before that I was a nurse.”

Nolan grunts, mildly surprised.

“Yeah, school and everything. Hey, want me to feed you one blueberry. Or, shit, you’re totally fasting for surgery. No blueberries yet babe. But I’ll save ‘em for you, promised didn’t I?”

“What if I just hold it in my mouth,” Nolan suggests. “I’ll spit it out when I’m done.”

Oh, maybe they have him on something in this IV. Indoor thought.

Travis is opening the blueberry box. “Yeah babe, sure. Here, just hold it on your tongue like an ice chip. Open up, babe.”

Nolan opens up.

—