A Series of Dreams

Up. Down. Up. Down. Beep... Beep...
I watch the respirator and the heart monitor create a rhythm. The clock chimes in with its tick-tock mocking; slowly at first, but quickly it has overpowered the other two. The pale blue wallpaper patterns waver at first and begin to let gravity take effect, melting into the hospital’s white tiled floors. I clench my jaw around the tube in my mouth – in fact halfway down my throat – and half-cough, watching small bits of spittle and phlegm sputter inside of it. The whole room begins to shake and quiver and the lights in the room begin to flicker and they begin to go out in rows from the outside inward, towards me. I’m not afraid as the row directly above me goes out.

I’m gone. Maybe.

This kind of thing has happened before. All my life in fact. As far back as I can remember, life has been in a sort of tunnel vision, how old movies used to be filmed with a circle around the frame. A dizzying flash of montages starting when I was five years old where I was taking the head off of a dead crow. I think I was curious as to why its blood was hot pink. Maybe it was a rat, though, and it was green blood. I only remember waking up suddenly to pouring rain and my father’s shouts about escaping to the levee. My hair looked green in the mirror image on the fogged car window, curled and slicked down to my skull. I looked out past my face and saw other people in other cars pushing and shoving in their lanes, trying to swim upstream.

I remember my marriage in much the same fashion. All my old friends were there. Joan and Patti and Mark and Colin glared at me from the lime pews as I put the ring on Katherine’s finger and I smiled back at them. Harold put a sawed off tree branch on the table in front of us at the reception breakfast, saying something briefly that our union meant war for the three of us.

My father’s death seems all the more unreal, as the loss of a parent usually will, but even more so in the translucency of memory. I must have been twenty-five because I lost my left pinky and ring fingers when I was twenty-six and I know I gripped my father’s warm dead right hand with my cold and clammy left tight enough to push what little blood was left in his body to the surface of his fingertips. My sister dug her sharp fingernails between my jaw and my neck to make me stop. At least I think she was my sister... Wait. No. That was my aunt’s funeral… My father died when I was six… I didn’t know or care what happened to him. He took my toys from me the week before and I was still angry at him. But I do remember that aunt’s funeral. She was a closet bestiality fetishist and my mother was upset because the morticians couldn’t fix the damage done to her jaw. She owned horses. Come to think of it I’m pretty sure it was my sister who gave me the scars under my right ear at that one. And I know that I’m not angry at my father now.

The further forward in time I think about, the times closer to the present, my vision becomes more bleary and sleepy…

Beep…Beep…Beep…
Shit…

I feel the thick ice of a new IV being inserted into the open portal to my vein in my right hand. The light’s come on all at once and I see three nurses and a doctor fussing about in the room. The walls still have their misty blue patterns wisping across them, the monitors and respirator have been turned back on, the god-forsaken clock has resumed its incessant ticking, and the tube is still halfway down my throat. I grunt and try to shake my left arm to let them know this god damned air tube is suffocating me instead of helping me breathe. One of the nurses sees me pointing at the tube and my eyes shooting back and forth from her to the tube, she’s coming over. She shoved the thing another two inches down my throat. She must have thought I wanted it that way. I sigh – kind of – and resign myself to lying here bald, bleeding somewhere in my chest from some tumor, with what must look like track marks from hell, and an air tube now ALL the way down my throat. Hopefully I’ll wake up soon and this will be just another memory.
Maybe.