Jack looked at the alarm clock, lost in a serene and gentle mist of parasomnic whimsy. Surely, they didn't miss the alarm, surely, it wasn't a Monday at Noon and 48 minutes.
BZZZZZZ went the phone, vibrating and shuddering as the distant reverberations of a harsh beep-beeping call indicator shot out from its speaker. The phone trembled with need, clattering in a heap after a brief plunge, absorbed in the embrace of the carpet.
The dazed creature languishing on the bed thought about sitting up to check the phone's call list, maybe it was Mom again asking them why they don't have their shit together. They were in a precarious position, comfortable, wrapped in blankets and burrowed into a veritable mound of soft pillows and stuffed animals. Safe enough to watch the shadows in their room grow steadily longer and longer.
Throughout the wait, they drifted forwards and backwards into worlds beyond, fighting dragons in their 10th grade math class, chasing treasure after a stirring lecture in the break room by not-quite Harrison Ford, pigging out on foods they've not been able to afford for months since their rent went up 100$. Wonderful, idle thoughts escalating into dreams that slowly layered over the alarm clock's indecipherable symbols, then surely would the clock return, unbothered by the episode.
Intermittently the phone went BZZZZZZ, muffled and irrelevant, no more tangible than the impossibly deep shadows now coalescing into necromancers and zombies.
"Should Jack be worried?" Jack thought, "Surely that annoying Buzzing is for something", they reasoned. Time is merely a suggestion.
Meanwhile as he smoked a cigarette on the loading dock, Tom glared daggers at his phone. Jack had not answered over 11 calls after missing his clock-in at 9am, it was now 5pm shift-change and the plant was behind in a big bad way. He called their manager, reported the incident, and heard a "god, we really can't afford to fire him" from the manager. For all of the grief Jack had caused today, there had better be a good reason for it. One simply does not assemble weapons of war without key engineering.
Tom got into his 2008 piece of shit Toyota Camry and made off at just barely the speed limit, listening to the engine's missing 4th cylinder whine the whole way there. The rattling trashfire of an automobile held together more by determination than duct tape and structural bondo creaked and moaned with pleads for a merciful death as it dragged into the parking space. Jack's car was where it always tended to be, under the covered parking assigned to them, the shredded rear passenger side tire as flat as ever.
Groaning with effort, Tom wrenched himself out of the self-propelled steel coffin he lovingly referred to as a car, and with tired heavy footsteps, made his way to the front of the building. Mrs. Marge was out smoking a cigarette, common for her at 6:30pm. The Saguaro rotting in the tiny rock filled plot to her left had its usual characteristic pair of sunglasses wedged 8 feet up from the ground. Its drooping arms looked about as dead as they did last month when Tom and Jack broke their extracurricular relationship off.
"Ain't you 'sposed to be dead?", croaked Mrs. Marge, who cocked an eyebrow that betrayed curiosity and not suspicion.
"Naw, did Jack say that?", Tom replied, feeling the siren call of his own cigarettes.
"Dunno, I heard your name and Dead once, so's I assumed. Hearing aids are goin' bad.", whinged Mrs. Marge.
"Hmm. Don't worry about it, we just broke up is all.", Tom brushed it off and resisted the urge to cozy up with a Marlboro on the cancer bench, it'd be easier to get this over with.
As he punched the lock override code into the security gate, Tom could make out a muttering 'fuckin queers' from Mrs. Marge, not out of character in the slightest. He fumbled with the callbox but managed to ring Jack's unit anyway. Like the dude's phone, nothing came back, and that's not normal for Jack. The annoyance bubbled still, but as he wound his way up the four flights of stairs to Jack's floor, Tom had a grinding suspicion something wasn't right. He started to worry he was going to find a body.
Crossing the threshold with the old key, Tom made his way into Jack's studio apartment without any resistance. Jack was lying there on their bed, staring eerily in the direction of the door and front window, completely motionless. The dark room swallowed the fading light of the Sonoran sun, and even with the light they'd installed in the ceiling, Jack's dingy little abode had a scarcity of visibility. They were breathing, but utterly motionless. What made Tom gasp was how their eyes were darting around in their sockets, impossibly fast and seemingly laser-precise, like Jack's brain was a CNC machine at peak hours.
Jack was breathing, had a pulse, didn't feel weird (not too hot, not too cold, not even all that sweaty which is unusual for them), but was locked up like they'd been dead for 12 hours, limp and unresponsive. Tom called 911, thinking it was a stroke. He sat with Jack throughout the whole thing, from the Fire Department's ambulance crew's arrival to a no-sirens trip to the ER (Jack wasn't in critical condition or anything, just frozen). Eventually some middle-aged rolly-polly of a man in a button-up shirt ambled in, did reflex tests that went nowhere, and ordered a goddamn spinal tap. If you looked at Jack's blood and vitals, it wouldn't be clear what was wrong, but apparently spinal fluid holds the secret.
Jack miraculously recovered two days later, barely able to speak or recall what the last three days had been spent doing. It'd happened abruptly while Tom had returned to the hospital with the rare treat of a Starbucks coffee, an odd reason for someone to emerge from a coma at any rate. Jack just knew time passed and at some point Tom was there, and as Tom helped Jack get from place to place, the weirdness of the whole thing continued to escalate. Jack was a hell of an engineer, one of those "watch me draw a perfect circle to spec" kinds of people, and now they couldn't even hold a pen without their entire arm trembling from the effort. Despite having had 20/20 vision at age 30, now Jack was bombing eye charts left and right, but there wasn't any visual deformities to their eyes. Jack wasn't exactly strong, but the dude was no slouch and could bench about as much as Tom could.
Something just wasn't right with their body, or entire nervous system as the Doctor had put it. Medications came to Jack in a laundry-list that rivaled the CVS receipts they'd be printed on. Amphetamine, Levodopa, Modafinil, Levothyroxine, Metoprolol Tartrate, Bupropion; all lovingly explained in normal people language by the Doctor's barely legible cursive. Tom had to add "Neurology" to his lexicon of extracurricular fields of study, ferrying Jack in his shitty little Toyota from doctor to doctor for weeks after. It's the kind of thing you do out of love, even if the person you love doesn't seem to be there quite like you remembered. After a few weeks of this all, Tom found himself explaining the issue in terms a woman like Mrs. Marge could understand. Shocking is the headway you can make to a transphobe if you smoke a cigarette on a porch with them for three weeks.
"No, Mrs. Marge, Jack isn't retarded", Tom huffed between tired drags, "They've got a rare genetic disorder that fucks up their nervous system."
"So the girl's got a nerves, so what?", gargled Mrs. Marge
"They have Parkinson's at 31.", Tom smashed the singed filter of his cigarette against the heel of his steel-toed boot to add emphasis.
"WHAT!?", Mrs. Marge spat, phlegm and cigarette smashing into the dead sunglasses wearing cactus. "Innit that only 'sposed to happen to old fucks like me?"
"Yes, Mrs. Marge, the doctor said it's rare for people like Jack.", Tom glanced at the shriveled little prune who grumbled and rubbed her temples.
Tom and Mrs. Marge sat in silence on the cancer bench. Mrs. Marge offered a cigarette and a lighter, which Tom took up, he barely had the cash for another pack this week. Mrs. Marge cleared her throat, muttering wordlessly at first before finally knocking loose whatever obstruction she spat at the dead cactus.
"Well, pardon me for being an old crow. They don't deserve it. Tell Jack I'm sorry.", pleaded Mrs. Marge.
It was progress.