I died on the way to the hospital but they weren’t willing to let me go, they insisted on bringing me back with their drugs and machines. I remember a dream wherein I bobbled balloon-like around the ceiling of the ambulance, looking down at my torn bloody body from outside as latex-gloved hands scuttling over me like crabs on a drowned corpse; hands doing hateful things to me. But the hallucination ended when I ectoplasmically burrowed back into that meat puppet shell.
I remember frantic voices and bright lights, and the acrid medicinal stench of the E.R. I knew so well from my misbegotten youth. They’d successfully jump-started me back into the land of the living but I was living in pulses by then, fading in and out until it all went completely black again as they wheeled me into the O.R.
I went away, for how long I couldn’t tell you. There was just enough consciousness flickering through me that I had a dim somatic self-awareness – but not enough to know my name or care about my situation.
My ego was on hold. ‘I’ no longer existed. ‘I’ was a plant, a vegetable enjoying my unconsciousness.
There was none of the pain of being a human, none of the burden of identity. Just sweet dreamless oblivion. It would have been nice to stay in that nirvana forever, but it wasn’t to be: my eye opened and I stared up at the plump pretty blonde nurse hovering over me.
She was adjusting some piece of equipment out of my field of vision. Wires and tubes were stuck all over me, their coordinated beeps chorusing throughout the room. Half my head was cocooned in bandages, and there was an agony where my left eye had been.
The nurse sensed me looking, and our gazes locked. She had beautiful hazel eyes that widened as she gasped; but she got her game face back on fast, gifting me with a smile.
“The children,” I groaned.
She shook her head, not understanding my gargling attempt at speech. I growled in frustration and heaved up off the bed. The nurse pressed my call button over and over and doctors, interns and RNs ran in like they had nothing better to do.
“Relax, Markus,” the oldest doctor said, pressing my shoulders back down. “You need to rest.”
I was too weak to fight the pin. And besides, the look he gave me wasn’t hostile. He was probably a pretty nice guy, a gray haired old veteran of the medical wars.
“The children,” I whispered, all energy fading fast.
He finally understood: “The children are all just fine, Markus. Not one has a scratch on them.”
“Okay then,” I muttered, and sank into blackness again.