When I opened my eyes the world looked dim and watery. It was as if I were diving and a long, long way beneath the surface.
I tried to move my head, but my neck muscles ignored me and nothing happened. Before long, I gave up. Using only my eyes, I scouted my surroundings as well as I could.
Everywhere I seemed to be looking through water. Down at the far edge of my vision I could see bits of what appeared to be yellow seaweed streaming upward from the sea bottom, long slender tentacles of plant life waved gracefully in the unseen currents like those Nebraska wheat fields they show on television when they play “America the Beautiful” before a football game. I could hear nothing at all except for a slight rushing in my ears. That seemed more or less consistent with being underwater, too, so cautiously I focused my consciousness on my chest and took stock of how the breathing process was going for me.
My lungs seemed to be working just fine. I could feel my chest rising and falling as they went about their work of pumping the air reliably in and out with what seemed to be their usual efficiency. Still, I thought they might be doing it somewhat more slowly than they had before…
Before?
Before what?
I couldn’t remember.
All of a sudden a face loomed in front of mine, a woman’s face, watery and wavering, but still real and so close I could touch her. I tried to touch her, but my arm muscles were working no better than my neck muscles had been and I couldn’t.
Anita? I called out to the face. Is that you, Anita? But the face didn’t answer.
Of course, it had to be Anita, but…
I fought my hazy memory, skirmishing with it in slow motion, and I felt myself moving toward something. I willed my eyes to focus on the face. I struggled to capture a clear image of it, one that I could lay next to the picture of Anita’s face that I carried always in my mind.
I could not do it. The face started to move away.
Wait! I shouted. Come back!
But the face slid beyond the edge of my vision and disappeared.
I thought about it for a moment and then I realized that I should hardly be surprised.
She couldn’t hear you, I told myself. You can’t shout underwater.
Underwater?
There it was again. The only idea I seemed to be able to grasp clearly. The only thought I could hold onto. I was underwater and yet I was still breathing just as if I were on dry land.
Abruptly there was a flash of motion off in the corner of my vision and I had a sensation of a brilliant golden light being born. Emergent and intensifying, it seemed to be pushing straight toward me. Frantically, I twisted my eyes as far as I could, searching desperately for the source. I found it and focused on it, and saw a fish coming directly toward me. A giant goldfish.
A fish? A goldfish?
Ah, shit, I thought, you’re not underwater.
You’re dead, man.
You’re dead and you’ve gone to the place where people go when they die, and this is it.
But I was so tired, I could only hold a single thought clearly. And it was this.
If that were true, if I was dead, then there was nothing I could do about it anyway.
So I closed my eyes and waited for whatever came next.
The next time I woke up and opened my eyes, the world looked different. A lot different.
I was in a darkened hospital room and in the gray dimness a faint glow of artificial light came from somewhere. This time when I tried to move, I found my neck muscles worked pretty well. I rolled my head in the direction of the light, then waited for my eyes to focus.
When they did I found myself looking into a softly lighted aquarium with tiny plantings of yellow sea grass lining its sandy bottom. I could hear the aquarium’s air pump humming in the background and a goldfish that seemed to me to be the size of a housecat was bumping against the glass side of the tank.
“Are you awake, Jack?” The woman’s voice came from the other side of my bed, the one opposite the aquarium. “Can you hear me?”
Slowly I rolled my head back. The woman had a nice face, but it was not Anita’s face. An Asian face instead. Dark hair, dark eyes, and skin that made me think of looking into a cup of cafe au lait.
At first I couldn’t put a name to the face, although I was sure I knew it. I swam upward through memory, groping for it.
Then I could put a name to it.
Kate.
It was Kate’s face.
“Where am I?” I asked her.
“The hospital,” she said. “You’ve been shot, but you’ll be fine.”
I kept gazing at Kate’s face.
“What are you staring at?” she eventually asked.
“You look so Thai, but you sound…so English.”
Kate laughed and it was a lovely laugh, throaty and warm. “Does that bother you?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “I was only thinking that…well, thank God it’s not the other way around.”
Kate thought about that for a second and then started laughing again, this time sticking her tongue into the corner of her mouth in mock disapproval. “I gather your sense of humor has survived pretty much intact,” she said.
I started to say something smooth and witty, then all at once everything that had happened to me came back. In a single fast-forwarding rush, it all came back.
“How long have I been out?” I asked.
“A little over twelve hours,” Kate said. “We were worried about you there for a while.”
“It was just a scratch on the cheek,” I said.
“Hardly,” Kate said. “You werelign=" shot twice. Once in the left side just below your heart and once in the left arm. The arm was only a flesh wound, but the other shot did some damage. You lost a lot of blood. You might have bled to death if we hadn’t found you when we did.”
I tried to take all that in, but I couldn’t get my arms around it. It didn’t really make any sense to me.
“It was just a scratch,” I repeated doggedly.
“As soon as you came in, they got the bleeding stopped and the bullet out of your abdomen. I know the surgeon. He’s a good man and he says there is no major damage to any organs.”
“I don’t remember anything like that.”
“When you feel like it, I’d very much like to hear what you do remember.”
I took a deep breath, pushed hard against the bottom, and rose all the way up until I broke through the surface.
“Now is okay,” I said.