_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [110]
Sergeant Hinkley moved to the door of the emergency room, looked in, and a smile crossed his face.
He turned back and walked to where Jo was sitting. “Hell no, he’s not dead,” he laughed. “They’re having trouble holding him down on the table.”
Jo leapt to her feet and threw her arms around the big police officer. “That’s my man,” she cried. “That’s my man!”
Inside the room I twisted, turned, and fought, trying to make sense of my predicament.
Where did all the fog come from?
That’s not fog, you idiot!
The hell it isn’t! It’s too cold not to be fog.
Why don’t those people shut up?
There. That’s better. The fog is moving away.
Look at the stars. Aren’t they beautiful? Jo would love them. But, my God, they are so bright! Well, I’ll just look at the blackness. Now, that’s black. I’ve never seen night like this before. Never stars so bright.
I turned toward the light.
But it’s not night over there. Over there it is beautiful. If I could go over there I could get away from the noise.
I struggled for a moment, struggled against the restraints before lying back. I was exhausted.
I fell back into the dark pit, back into the sleep without dreams, only to be awakened again by the noise…
To hell with those loud people! I turned to the beauty. The grass reached out, beckoning to me. The earth itself was alive, and it flowed to me, and the trees were living creatures, green-golden-silver, swaying into a canopy through which there shone a glorious golden light.
Was I moving closer to…
To what?
I could feel life draining from me, but it was being replaced, and the thought whispered through my mind that nothing in life, nothing between heaven and earth, is really lost, and there was comfort in that when the light appeared as a tiny speck in the darkness, a light swelling in size and in brilliance, filling an endless globe of darkness, yet translucent and becoming a cross to fill the world and the universe beyond. A never-ending universe before me, shining from within, and I thought of God.
But I was alone.
Drifting in space.
Alone?
Where was God, I asked, and suddenly, out of the light, out of its magnificent brilliance there appeared a darker form, a bed—that’s what it was, a huge bed being pushed by two white shadowed forms, two nurses, and I heard the gallop of their feet, the high-pitched squeal of wheels needing oil…
The brilliant light vanished. It was gone.
There was only the huge bed, the nurses taking tremendous strides, crashing through the darkness, the squealing wheels…
An invisible hand grasped me, swept me like a leaf in a high wind after the fleeing nurses.
Instantly the bed and the nurses stopped, and I suddenly realized there was someone in the bed. A man. A familiar man, and he turned his head to face me.
Me. Hell, it was my own body. I was in the bed, but I wasn’t. How could this be?
Where are we going? I asked in my silent voice.
“We’re going to CIC.”
“What’s that?” another voice asked.
“Cardiac Intensive Care.”
I moved into the huge bed, into my body, into a body strapped to the railings with arms loaded with IVs, with a mouth filled with tubes.
Suddenly we were moving down a long hall, moving by people, by equipment, and in step with disassociated sounds.
Sleep—I drifted into sleep. Welcomed sleep…
Sleep.
I spent the first two days in the hospital, my body inhabited by tubes, fighting restraints, trying to remember. I kept waking up, writing on a pad one question: What happened?
My wife would tell me, and I would promptly forget.
My brain was literally swollen. The minutes it had been deprived of oxygen-rich blood had caused it to swell, and the doctors said I wouldn’t be fully conscious until the swelling went down.
The question was how long would it take me to remember, and whether I would ever really recall any of the events surrounding my “sudden death.”
The answer was yes; I was recalling them, but slowly. There was confusion between the real and the unreal. But after two days I’d come far enough back that they removed the restraints, removed the tubes from my throat.