Scenes to Forget

From the top of the stairs to the curb was only five large cement steps. The paint on the iron handrail was chipped and rusted through in places. I was just going to the corner for a snack. Out of the corner of my eye, just peeking over the sidewalk was a candy wrapper. Tootsie-Roll Blow Pop to be specific. Red and blue, crumpled plastic just on the edge of the sidewalk.

When I looked up again I saw the sky above me. The candy wrapper had flown away. People had gathered around me. I couldn't make sense out of what they were saying. Voices seemed over-loud like marbles in a blender. The dirt in my eyes burned. I couldn't find my hands. They were still attached to my arms but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't lift them. I couldn't roll over to figure out why I was laying on the sidewalk.

The person who rolled me over had no idea. I am sure he meant well. I am sure he thought I would be able to get up and move around after getting my bearings. I am sure he had no idea. If he knew, how could he have done this to me?

The first movement tore the sky away from the ground. Everything lurched, hard, to the right. The abrupt direction made no sense. I was on the sidewalk... on my back... now where had the concrete gone?

The next movement spun me like a washing machine on spin cycle, complete with "unbalanced load" alarms beeping. I am sure he had no idea. No idea that once the vomiting started I would have no way to stop. The nausea wasn't inside me anymore. The retching emptying of my stomach carried years of my life into the gutter. I am sure he had no idea that some of my favorite days were lost like that damned lollipop wrapper.

Someone thought that holding my head might stop the hurricane thrashing me around. That might have been me. I could see my hands but they were so dark. Everything felt dark, muddied and hot. When the tsunami in my mind slowed to a dull wave, I looked up to see the concrete stairs were still there. Sounds were still fugitive. I could make out the dull bell across the street as cars pulled into the gas station. Being comforted by a flat tinkling bell was strange reassurance.

Inches of red raw pain allowed me to pull myself half up the stairs. The railing failed me just like my college girlfriend. You had one fucking job. Couldnt even do that. Holding the broken railing in my burned-black hand made no sense. I couldn't lift the railing any further. The stairs had no use for failure. They too, were disappointed in the handrail.

Many bells later I was happy to hold my eyes closed with my less dirty hand. Why the railing had chosen to come to rest on my legs, I couldn't make sense of. It weighed so much more now that it was free from the concrete. With my eyes filled with grime and sourness, I didnt have much reason to trust the story they were playing.

Waiting for more bells...then they were silent. Doors closed and dinner smells opened. Humid air that reeked of lost socks rolled down the sidewalk. As the stench passed I looked up, expecting to see something different. Something less like a gas station, perhaps more like a bus station but stationary all the same. Instead the movie before my eyes was quick and sudden. Playing forwards first, then slowly backwards to make sure I saw every detail.

It is never the first mouthful of vomit that burns. The last bits of puke that you find behind your ears makes you wonder. Then the burning. Then the story plays again. Forwards then backwards.

A young woman and her boyfriend, both of them no more than high school kids. Holding hands and walking quickly through the doorway across the silent street. The door closed with a stiff puff of air that smelled of rubber and oil. Across the street, I could hear their quick steps as they raced upstairs. Unseen stopping on the landing meant so much more the first time I heard it. Forward it made me smile. Of course.

Stolen time in the empty stockroom was filled with sighs and moans. Forward motion and I could almost hear their flaccid conversation. Simple things: tomorrow who would do what. Gentle smile you could hear in the soft spaces between words. The words had smaller feet and took longer steps.

No one told me to hold my breath. The pigeons lied about how awesome the stoop was. And nothing barks as loud as a gun at that range. Flashing twice, like daylight and then gone. The smacking echo against the concrete behind my head told me lies about where I would sleep that night. The young couple poked their heads above the window ledge, looking down onto the street below. Both carried on a silent conversation without their mouths moving. The glass had one job and it too was a failure. Even with the sashes painted shut and years of flies sealing the window shut, there was no way to hold back the screaming.

As the wail fell onto the street below, lights from televisions doubled as porchlights came on. My own movie played out first slowly, forward. Then reversed. Their terror was inhaled in the same breath that sucked their mouths closed. Their eyes however grew bigger. They had seen and couldn't shut out that light. The report and then again. They had seen the fear, the face of confusion, the asking begging visage trying to understand Beowulf... and then deciding that Wheel of Fortune was more than enough to grasp with one grimy hand.

The warmth was a graceful wet towel that wrapped around my neck. With no reason to look, the hot flood around my neck told me the plants wouldn't need to be watered. Thumbs dug into my eyes to stop the constant turning of the street... and still the glass failed to hold the screaming. They had seen. The dirty dust-caked window had one fucking job. More failure.

As I died they watched.

When the street blossomed with loud cars and sirens, the screaming poured into an old Gatorade bottle half filled with urine. Cigarettes shoved into my ears carried the soft reassurance that I would miss the best part of the story. Silence settled with a cold white blanket, almost reaching my feet.

The tape played back slowly, unreeling the taken up slack... first the quiet vanished. Replaced with bright sharp sounds and chased by cars undriving themselves down the street. The scream inhaled the smeared glass torrent. The loud report and repeat. The moans and cries returned with quiet reassuring thumping. Their backward jump through the doorway and onto the sidewalk would have seemed out of place if I hadn't watched it once already. This time the candy wrapper made its way onto the sidewalk before the handrail abandoned hope. Five steps down, up. Wound up again, the story replayed. Each time they watched from the window. Each time their screams etched grooves in the shellac to be played back over and over. And each time, I died as they watched.

Thoughts on Dying (repost from April 2010)

Let me begin with the obvious: I am alive. But I think of death often. Not with any morbid fascination, but more the casualness one would exhibit looking through a family photo album.

Perhaps we should call this the first glance through an album of memories.

But are they your memories if they didn't happen during your lifetime? What do you call things that happen while your body sleeps and your mind doesn't?

_______________________________

Let me say again: I am alive. I know this because the smells are different. The light is better too.

For a long time I lingered in a twilight haze of ashy shadow and grease. It was always 3am. For years at a time, it was always 3am.

Each day began with me sitting at a table. Outdoors, but without the weather that comes from being outside. The table was made of downward curving metal, perforated with large half-inch holes over the entire surface. The tabletop was covered in a thin rubber coating that once must have been mustard colored but now, like everything else around me, was dingy, grey and fading. Not quite black but never again anything remotely as lively as yellow.

The table was the end of the line for the production of the fast-food joint I was at. No one stood at a counter to take you order... well, not really. There was always someone standing there... but they just looked at you and then looked down as though that would tell you all you needed to know about ordering your meal. A meal. Even now I am not sure I can call it that. Imagine the ubiquity of water fountains and now imagine that in the same way, all food supply units were essentially a bastardized version of Burger King.

After looking down to order, something would be garbled back behind a wall, sounds of movement would begin, quiet, hushed then loud clunking and slow feet shuffling. Far across the open space of the dining plaza, a garbage can would start to beep. Incessantly, but quietly so as to not annoy you if you weren't really sure yet that you wanted the food coming your way.

Then with a whir it would present, through the open slot. Your food. On a tray, grey-brown with wet paper separating the food from the sticky plastic tray. Almost warm but by no means hot. Smells of old onions, scorched coffee and egg shells are the first smack to the face.

Leaving the tray and food intact, I am sure there has to be something better around to eat. I also desperately need to find a bathroom. It has been days since I could pee. I would trade a perfect chocolate milkshake for a chance to pee in a clean bathroom. But there is no bathroom. When I ask at the counter where the meal originated, I get the same bleary eyed response... that downward cast glance as though one could order a trip to the bathroom through this device.

I look down at my clothes. A cover-all that once must have been blue-grey with thin white stripes, but now, like everything else, it was greyed with time, grease and dust. I can't find the sun in the sky. The buildings around me rise ceaselessly into the sky, each one a copy of the one beside it. There is an occasional breeze which at first feels like it might have the warm touch of spring but by the time I can sort out the smell I am overwhelmed with the sickly sweet aroma of decay. The wind grows until I have to duck into an entryway of building so as to escape from the stench that threatens to coat my skin with an oily scum.

Looking through the scratched silver windows of the building lobby, I keep my eyes moving... hoping for someone to talk to. I really want to find a bathroom.

Walking farther down the street, I find a body curled around a bench made from the same perforated metal rounded into tables like I saw earlier. Finding at first his head amongst the papers and rags, I was unsure he was awake. With none of his hands visible I feared that if I asked of their absence, knowing would be worse than the reek wafting from him. Just when I was sure that he was deep aslumber, he opened one eye at me. Asking me with that same downward glaze and soundless hush, he asked why I was there.

I told him I wanted to die.

I also needed to pee.

Laughing into last month's urine soaked newspaper, he turned his head to me. Our eyes met only briefly before I turned away, afraid that his one good eye might see me for what I was. His other eye, caked with drying puss, kept oozing with each blink.If only he would look away... I could ask him again.

Before I can repeat myself he lifts his shriveled hands from beneath his shabby mound and points to an alleyway a few feet away. Slumped between a wall uncertain of its future and the ground well past worn, a woman looks at the needle in her arm, hoping for release. I am not even worth a glare from her direction.

With a plaintive look on my face, I ask again: how can I die?

Shouldering the wet mass of cloth and sopping cardboard, paper and shit, he pushes me headlong towards a guardrail over a highway. Looking down, bits of detritus falling away, he admonishes me to pick one. Slow or fast, both definite. Either way, I could die. Looking for some merciful solution, I look all around, hoping someone would see me in my plight. I asked again: How can I die?

Laughing that piteous laugh again, he slurs through wet teeth that all I need to do is keep eating the food that came out of that slot.

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END
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For folks who wonder: I have contemplated suicide only a few times in my life. Mostly during a rough time in college when my girlfriend had been replaced with a demon from hell.

I find it interesting that while in the coma, I needed to pee. I find this to have been almost an omnipresent sensation throughout all of the coma dreams.

But the wish for dying? I did want to know. How could I escape the 3am grey-gloom? I would have done anything to break free of those awful smells and sights. Even now, I feel the need to scrub my body with borax in the shower... anything to get that oily stench off of my skin.

I know you don't smell things in dreams. I never dreamed for years at a time before either.

Hell is a Lonesome Place

Hell is a lonesome place.

Dark, wet, and sticky. Smells like the ass-end of a Burger King dumpster on a hot summer's day.

My friends aren't here. This is hell.

If I had friends here it wouldn't be so bad.

The tables in hell are made from perforated metal... large holes maybe an inch across, and then dipped in some grippy plastic. The tops of the tables curve downward slightly, like they were left out in the sun just a touch too long and started to droop.

None of the chairs in hell are comfortable. They either have no backs, or they rock side to side. Find the perfect chair only to realize that the back is broken as you lean back and nearly fall. Stand up and find yourself covered in itchy pet fur, bits of torn wool and reeking of stale urine.

In hell the televisions are always on. Nothing you want to see is on... but the TV strobes in and out of your vision no matter where you look. Compelling, numbing and terrifying at the same time. The audio track fails to sync so the newscaster's voice sounds too much like a detergent commercial.

Hell's designer should be fired on the basis of creating false promises. Everywhere that should be clean is anything but. Places that should be hidden from view, you are forced to walk through. Escalators that lurch and stagger. Handrails wait with splinters and smears of mucus left behind by toddlers too young to know better.

The custodial crew in hell expect everything to be recycled. Not just the good stuff. Everything. When you line up for your meal tray, and try to catch a glimpse of the kitchen, it looks like the food was just pulled out of garbage bags and broken milk crates. It is the smell that gets you though. The same salty, hot oil... the knowing scent of fried something or other. Your mouth waters before you notice the sickly sweet smell of rancid putrification.

In hell there are no bathrooms. Never mind a long line, there are no bathrooms. And worse still, you always need to pee. Every dark corner looks appealing as a place to stop and urinate until you realize that is exactly what everyone else has done. The pain comes in waves. Nausea mixed with sheer terror at having to keep waiting for a real bathroom. There has to be a bathroom somewhere. But there isn't. Hell's plumbing was designed by a general surgeon.

All of the voices in hell combine fingers on a chalkboard with toddler wailing. The resultant reverberation makes conversations sound like the clamor of an engine room on a cruise ship. In hell, you can see the horrific waves of halitosis as people cajole one another. Eventually, even your own inner voice starts to sound like your neighbor's cat in heat at two in the morning.

In hell, your fellow travelers are the bastards who screwed up everything they touched in your life. They are the assholes who broke your heart, teased you, molested you, chose you last for games on the schoolyard. Remembering the spilled milk, torn clothes, bitter iron in your mouth mixed with salty tears and the slurping back of the snot that just won't stop running down your nose... these are the people standing next to you everywhere you go in hell.

There is no view in hell. I tried for over a year to find a place from which to see out. I looked for a window, but all the windows just led to more halls, rooms, and escalators. There is no outside in hell. Everything is wrapped up in the dusty oily resinous exhaust that builds up between the acrid cleaning sessions that happen so infrequently. Touch anything and that grime finds its way on to you with even the slightest brush. Mirrors laugh at your reflection.

I kept waiting for a phone call in hell. All of the cell phones in hell ring incessantly. Not mine. I was surprised to see that there is cell reception in hell. Probably because of AT&T. To this day, I am not sure if that call would have been a pardon or my final sentencing.

I was in hell for over a year. Trying to tell time in perpetual twilight is like vertigo for the timeline.

Next week I begin the observance of my third year since entering the coma. This story was just one of many dozens that came from that experience.