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What's going on here? I yell, but the yell is only in my head. My lips don't move. I can feel them—and my tongue, lying on the floor of my mouth like a stunned mole—but I can't move them.
The thing I'm on starts rolling again. A moving bed? Yes. A gurney, in other words. I've had some experience with them, a long time ago, in Lyndon Johnson's shitty little Asian adventure. It comes to me that I'm in a hospital, that something bad has happened to me, something like the explosion that almost neutered me twenty-three years before, and that I'm going to be operated on. There are a lot of answers in that idea, sensible ones, for the most part, but I don't hurt anywhere. Except for the minor matter of being scared out of my wits, I feel fine. And if these are orderlies wheeling me into an operating room, why can't I see? Why can't I talk?
A third voice: 'Over here, boys.'
My rolling bed is pushed in a new direction, and the question drumming in my head is What kind of a mess have I gotten myself into?
Doesn't that depend on who you are? I ask myself, but that's one thing, at least, I find I do know. I'm Howard Cottrell. I'm a stock broker known to some of my colleagues as Howard the Conqueror.
Second voice (from just above my head): 'You're looking very pretty today, doc.'
Fourth voice (female, and cool): 'It's always nice to be validated by you, Rusty. Could you hurry up a little? The babysitter expects me back by seven. She's committed to dinner with her parents.'
Back by seven, back by seven. It's still the afternoon, maybe, or early evening, but black in here, black as your hat, black as a woodchuck's asshole, black as midnight in Persia, and what's going on? Where have I been? What have I been doing? Why haven't I been manning the phones?
Because it's Saturday, a voice from far down murmurs. You were . . . were . . .
A sound: WHOCK! A sound I love. A sound I more or less live for. The sound of . . . what? The head of a golf-club, of course. Hitting a ball off the tee. I stand, watching it fly off into the blue . . .
I'm grabbed, shoulders and calves, and lifted. It startles me terribly, and I try to scream. No sound comes out . . . or perhaps one does, a tiny squeak, much tinier than the one produced by the wheel below me. Probably not even that. Probably it's just my imagination.
I'm swung through the air in an envelope of blackness—Hey, don't drop me, I've got a bad back! I try to say, and again there's no movement of the lips or teeth; my tongue goes on lying on the floor of my mouth, the mole maybe not just stunned but dead, and now I have a terrible thought, one which spikes fright a degree closer to panic: what if they put me down the wrong way and my tongue slides backward and blocks my windpipe? I won't be able to breathe! That's what people mean when they say someone 'swallowed his tongue,' isn't it?
Second voice (Rusty): 'You'll like this one, doc, he looks like Michael Bolton.'
Female doc: 'Who's that?'
Third voice—sounds like a young man, not much more than a teenager: 'He's this white lounge-singer who wants to be black. I don't think this is him.'
There's laughter at that, the female voice joining in (a little doubtfully), and as I am set down on what feels like a padded table, Rusty starts some new crack—he's got a whole standup routine, it seems. I lose this bit of hilarity in a burst of sudden horror. I won't be able to breathe if my tongue blocks my windpipe, that's the thought which has just gone through my mind, but what if I'm not breathing now?
What if I'm dead? What if this is what death is like?
It fits. It fits everything with a horrid prophylactic snugness. The dark. The rubbery smell. Nowadays I am Howard the Conqueror, stock broker extraordinaire, terror of Derry Municipal Country Club, frequent habitue of what is known at golf courses all over the world as The Nineteenth Hole, but in '71 I was part of a Medical Assistance Team in the Mekong Delta, a scared kid who sometimes woke up weteyed from dreams of the family dog, and all at once I know this feel, this smell.
Dear God, I'm in a bodybag.
First voice: 'Want to sign this, doc? Remember to bear down hard—it's three copies.'
Sound of a pen, scraping away on paper. I imagine the owner of the first voice holding out a clipboard to the woman doctor.
Oh dear Jesus let me not be dead! I try to scream, and nothing comes out.
I'm breathing though . . . aren't I? I mean, I can't feel myself doing it, but
my lungs seem okay, they're not throbbing or yelling for air the way they do when you've swum too far underwater, so I must be okay, right?
Except if you're dead, the deep voice murmurs, they wouldn't be crying out for air, would they? No—because dead lungs don't need to breathe. Dead lungs can just kind of . . . take it easy.
Rusty: 'What are you doing next Saturday night, doc?'
But if I'm dead, how can I feel? How can I smell the bag I'm in? How can I hear these voices, the doc now saying that next Saturday night she's going to be shampooing her dog which is named Rusty, what a coincidence, and all of them laughing? If I'm dead, why aren't I either gone or in the white light they're always talking about on Oprah?
There's a harsh ripping sound and all at once I am in white light; it is blinding, like the sun breaking through a scrim of clouds on a winter day. I try to squint my eyes shut against it, but nothing happens. My eyelids are like blinds on broken rollers.
A face bends over me, blocking off part of the glare, which comes not from some dazzling astral plane but from a bank of overhead fluorescents. The face belongs to a young, conventionally handsome man of about twenty-five; he looks like one of those beach beefcakes on Baywatch or Melrose Place. Marginally smarter, though. He's got a lot of dark black hair under a carelessly worn surgical- greens cap. He's wearing the tunic, too. His eyes are cobalt blue, the sort of eyes girls reputedly die for. There are dusty arcs of freckles high up on his cheekbones.
'Hey, gosh,' he says. It's the third voice. 'This guy does look like Michael Bolton! A little long in the old tootharoo; maybe . . .' He leans closer. One of the flat tie-ribbons at the neck of his greens tunic tickles against my forehead. '. . . but yeah. I see it. Hey, Michael, sing something.'
Help me! is what I'm trying to sing, but I can only look up into his dark blue eyes with my frozen dead man's stare; I can only wonder if I am a dead man, if this is how it happens, if this is what everyone goes through after the pump quits. If I'm still alive, how come he hasn't seen my pupils contract when the light hit them? But I know the answer to that . . . or I think I do. They didn't contract. That's why the glare from the fluorescents is so painful.
The tie, tickling across my forehead like a feather.
Help me! I scream up at the Baywatch beefcake, who is probably an intern or maybe just a med-school brat. Help me, please!
My lips don't even quiver.
