“Well, they did mention gram-negative bacteria and meningitis.”
“I have two exams in the next few days, so I’m going to leave some quick messages with my teachers,” said Eben.
Eben later told me that, initially, he was hesitant to believe that I was in as grave danger as Phyllis had indicated, since she and Holley always “blew things out of proportion”—
As Eben drove toward Virginia, an icy pelting rain started up. Phyllis had left Boston at six o’clock, and as Eben headed toward the I-495 bridge over the Potomac River into Virginia, she was passing through the clouds overhead. She landed at Richmond, rented a car, and got onto Route 60 herself.
When he was just a few miles outside Lynchburg, Eben called Holley.
“How’s Bond?” he asked.
“Asleep,” Holley said.
“I’m going to go straight to the hospital then,” Eben said.
“You sure you don’t want to come home first?”
“No,” Eben said. “I just want to see Dad.”
Eben pulled up at the Medical Intensive Care Unit at 11:15 P.M. The walkway into the hospital was starting to ice over, and when he came into the bright lights of the reception area he saw only a night reception nurse. She led him to my ICU bed.
By that point, everyone who had been there earlier had finally gone home. The only sounds in the large, dimly lit room were the quiet beeps and hisses of the machines keeping my body going.
Eben froze in the doorway when he saw me. In his twenty years, he’d never seen me with more than a cold. Now, in spite of all the machines doing their best to make it seem otherwise, he was looking at what he knew was, essentially, a corpse. My physical body was there in front of him, but the dad he knew was gone.
Or perhaps a better word to use is: elsewhere.
5. Underworld
Darkness, but a visible darkness—like being submerged in mud yet also being able to see through it. Or maybe dirty Jell-O describes it better. Transparent, but in a bleary, blurry, claustrophobic, suffocating kind of way.
Consciousness, but consciousness without memory or identity—like a dream where you know what’s going on around you, but have no real idea of who, or what,
Sound, too: a deep, rhythmic pounding, distant yet strong, so that each pulse of it goes right through you. Like a heartbeat? A little, but darker, more mechanical—like the sound of metal against metal, as if a giant, subterranean blacksmith is pounding an anvil somewhere off in the distance: pounding it so hard that the sound vibrates through the earth, or the mud, or wherever it is that you are.
I didn’t have a body—not one that I was aware of anyway. I was simply…
How long did I reside in this world? I have no idea. When you go to a place where there’s no sense of time as we experience it in the ordinary world, accurately describing the way it feels is next to impossible. When it was happening, when I was there, I felt like I (whatever “I” was) had always been there and would always continue to be.
Nor, initially at least, did I mind this. Why would I, after all, since this state of being was the only one I’d ever known? Having no memory of anything better, I was not particularly bothered by where I was. I do recall conceptualizing that I might or might not survive, but my indifference as to whether I did or not only gave me a greater feeling of invulnerability. I was clueless as to the rules that governed this world I was in, but I was in no hurry to learn them. After all, why bother?
I can’t say exactly when it happened, but at a certain point I became aware of some objects around me. They were a little like roots, and a little like blood vessels in a vast, muddy womb. Glowing a dark, dirty red, they reached down from some place far above to some other place equally far below. In retrospect, looking at them was like being a mole or earthworm, buried deep in the ground yet somehow able to see the tangled matrixes of roots and trees surrounding it.
That’s why, thinking back to this place later, I came to call it the Realm of the Earthworm’s-Eye View. For a long time, I suspected it might have been some kind of memory of what my brain felt like during the period when the bacteria were originally overrunning it.
But the more I thought about this explanation (and again, this was all much, much later), the less sense it made. Because—hard as this is to picture if you haven’t been to this place yourself—my consciousness wasn’t foggy or distorted when I was there. It was just…
The longer I stayed in this place, the less comfortable I became. At first I was so deeply immersed in it that there was no difference between “me” and the half-creepy, half-familiar element that surrounded me. But gradually this sense of deep, timeless, and boundaryless immersion gave way to something else: a feeling like I wasn’t really part of this subterranean world at all, but trapped in it.
Grotesque animal faces bubbled out of the muck, groaned or screeched, and then were gone again. I heard an occasional dull roar. Sometimes these roars changed to dim, rhythmic chants, chants that were both terrifying and weirdly familiar—as if at some point I’d known and uttered them all myself.
As I had no memory of prior existence, my time in this realm stretched way, way out. Months? Years? Eternity? Regardless of the answer, I eventually got to a point where the creepy-crawly feeling totally outweighed the homey, familiar feeling. The more I began to feel like a
Then I became aware of a smell: a little like feces, a little like blood, and a little like vomit. A
But where would I go?
Even as I asked that question, something new emerged from the darkness above: something that wasn’t cold, or dead, or dark, but the exact opposite of all those things. If I tried for the rest of my life, I would never be able to do justice to this entity that now approached me… to come anywhere close to describing how beautiful it was.
But I’m going to try.
6. An Anchor to Life
Phyllis pulled into the hospital parking lot just under two hours after Eben IV had, at around 1 A.M. When she got to my ICU room she found Eben IV sitting next to my bed, clutching a hospital pillow in