tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70218831346626638592024-03-13T07:52:55.639-07:00***erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-86596458997415295952012-10-30T12:29:00.000-07:002012-10-30T12:46:13.403-07:00Anatomy of a Dream finally published<i>Anatomy of a Dream</i> is now available for download on Smashwords, free for a limited time<br />
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...a first-year medical student finds his dissections invaded by the visions of a Bird Man, as he tries to realize his dream of becoming a physician in the Land of the Living Bible...<br />
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https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/249685erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-12978017456866773482011-03-11T13:29:00.000-08:002011-03-11T13:33:23.470-08:00RELIGION<p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Dead. With perfect makeup. Thick died black hair, almost invisible white roots. She was wearing a frilly chemise under her hospital gown stained with vomit. Proper in fashion and grooming in the way that only the elderly can be. Her skin was yellow from the cancer that has torn through her liver. The same cancer that ate away her fat and muscle, so that she nothing but hollowed temples and scaphoid belly.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">The goblin green line of the cardiac monitor scribbled electrical chaos. Ventricular fibrillation. Our patient, limp and grey, lay bonelessly on the CT scanner table. Her heart fluttered like a bag of worms. That sort of chaos can’t pump blood, can’t supply oxygen to the brain.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">The CT suite had bland white and chrome features centered on an enormous metal donut. Surrounding my dead patient was a cadre of nurses, techs, her doctor, and me. The smell of death was cheap air freshener and cold sweat.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">I do not suffer death in my presence.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Randy, sweaty and bald in scrubs that hung in all the wrong ways, held a finger over the orange SHOCK button.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Everyone clear? All clear?,” I said, my voice certain and monotonous from thousand resuscitations. “Shock.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> The LifePak buzzed as it unleashed an electrical storm. My dead patient’s body arced upwards. All eyes went to the monitor. Still a scribble. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Still in V-fib. Charge again,” I said. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Charging,” Randy replied. The LifePak 12 whined.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Shock,” I said. The LifePak buzzed, and the dead woman’s body arced upwards, as if trying to reach for heaven. Then she flopped down again. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Her doctor was talking on the phone to a nurse on one of the many floors of one of his many patients. Abdul Malek was a skinny dark guy with a belt of pagers and phones that seemed to weigh more than he did, all going off constantly. I looked up at him. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “It’s your Code, Big Guy,” he said, with a thick Eastern European accent and Gallic shrug. He knew it was my thing. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Code Blue was the euphemism for cardiac arrest. When they announced Code Blue over the loudspeakers, it didn’t upset the patients as much. Sick people didn’t like to hear that other people were dying around them. Other doctors ran away from codes. As an Emergency Physician, I ran toward them. On any given day I was a generalist, treating anything from runny noses to gunshot wounds, psychotic breakdowns to pneumonias. Resuscitations were the one thing I did best. So, when we heard “Code Blue: CT scanner,” on the loudspeaker overhead, Randy and I came running. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Check the pulse,” I said. Randy, my nurse, had a sheen of sweat over his bald head. Shocking, childlike blue eyes under craggy brows, turned to me and nodded. The racing green line of the monitor showed fast regular complexes, like the same calligraphy letter written over and over again. Her pulse thundered in her wrist. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “She’s back,” I said. Her eyes were closed, and the oxygen mask steamed with each breath. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Pressure is 180/120, doctor,” Randy says, swinging his stethoscope around his neck dog-collar style. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “She’s riding the ‘Epi’ train. It won't last long,” I said. Epinephrine is pure adrenaline. Shoot into someone’s blood like I just did, even a dead hearts will beat for a few minutes. “Hang dopamine at 10 mics, and let’s get ready to intubate.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> I look up at Malek. He puts the phone back on the wall and shakes his head. He claps his hand on my shoulder in a brotherly way. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Listen, big guy, you did a great job. I just talked with her family. She’s a DNR.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> DNR. Do Not Resuscitate. The wisdom to realize when medicine has reached the end, and when the disease is our best friend because it will take the pain away. Malek looked sad, sad for me. He knew that I lived for the resuscitation. I got wrapped up in it, the battle between medicine and death, and I lost perspective.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">I looked down at her. Her mascara wasn’t even smudged. She had recently done her nails with burgundy polish. This was a woman that wanted to live. She wanted to live.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Elaine! Elaine, can you hear me?!” I shouted. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> No response. She coughed. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Elaine, we just restarted your heart. I want to put you on life support. Do you want us to do that?”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">She coughed. Her mouth seemed to be moving, but I couldn't hear what she was saying. I leaned in closer.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Are you a religious man?” she whispered from frothy, cracked lips. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> I leaned closer. I was pretty sure I imagined her voice. Most people are unconscious that close to death. It makes tearing them open, shocking them, violating their deaths that much easier. She couldn’t be talking to me. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Are you a religious man, doctor?” she asked again, and either from her lungs or my conscience I heard her. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> I have heard this question a hundred times from my patients. As someone who stands with one foot on the border between life or death, these questions are of importance. It’s a question I frequently ask myself. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> I can hear the clanging of bells in the distance. Ten arms falling as one, ten iron bells clanging. Chanting. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> ***</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> To Ho Ka Mi Eh Mi Ta Me. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> I am no longer wearing scrubs and a stethoscope. I am twenty years younger, with wisps of beard clinging to my face. I am wearing a simple t-shirt with a logo of a mountain, and <i>gi</i> pants. Sennin Kai. I am chanting. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> This is my first Misogi. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> To Ho Ka Mi Eh Mi Ta Me. To Ho Ka Mi Eh Mi Ta Me. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Misogi is an ancient ritual of purification. We gather in the dawn light, when the dew still clings to the grass, on New Years Day. We are teachers, computer programmers, lawyers and accountants by day. By night we learn the rituals and meditations of monks long dead. Sennin Do means we live like the Sennin, the immortal ones who ate air and flew with the dragons. We are men and women of science and modernity, and we understand these rituals are only to focus our minds and clean our bodies, but that makes them no less magical. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> The chant itself has no translation. It means what you want it to mean. There is no magic except the sweat of ten arms falling and the overwhelming clamor of ten bells and ten throats. I am benevolently obsessed. Absorbed.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> The chant becomes faster. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Toho Kami Ehmi Tame! Toho Kami Ehmi! Tame!</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> ***</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> She had gotten off the Epi train. Her heart was slowing, and the aggressive pink sheen of her skin was starting to fade to grey. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Sinus brady,” I said. The calligraphy letters on the cardiac monitor were getting farther and farther apart. “We’re going to pace her. We can do that with a DNR, right?”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Malek shrugged. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Right. Randy, give me a half-mig of Atropine and grab the pads.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> He pulled off her gown to show folds of excess skin over rotten ribs. Plastic pacer pads were stuck over her chest and back. Unlike an internal pacemaker under the skin, this was a cruder kind. Her own heart couldn’t give the electrical kick, so we would provide our own. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “100 milliamps, rate of 60.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Another line of green. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “No capture.”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Malek looked sad. Not sad for the patient. Sad for me.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Big guy, she’s got cancer. She’s only got a few months anyway.”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">He stepped back, already divorcing himself from the drama. We were in sketchy territory here, legally and ethically. On the edge between life and death, it was each doctor’s decision. At least we thought so. Usually the choice was out of our hands whether we believed it or not.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> ***<br /><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Toho! Kami! Ehmi! Tame! Toho! Kami! Ehmi! Tame!</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> This is my second Misogi, that we do every year. I have become an instructor, the youngest instructor in his dojo. Twenty years old.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">I sit on the right hand side of my Sensei. His eyes are closed. My eyes should also be closed, but I can’t help watch him. He has a handsome, childlike face with thinning brown hair and horrible brown teeth, likely stained from tetracycline when he was a child. Soon, it will be my turn to take his place.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Even through the chant, my mind would wander. I thought of running the dojo, how I would attract more students. How I would motivate them, inspire them. I would help people understand the peace and power that I had found. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Toho Kami Ehmi Tame!</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> ***</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> I felt my hands shake. I was wasting my time. Let her die. Let her die. My mind, my training, my collegues are telling me to let her die. I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be in the ER. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “No capture, doctor,” Randy said.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Patients came to me and they died. That’s what it meant to be an Emergency Room doctor. They fell asleep while driving and roll their SUVs and they died. They drank for forty years and vomited blood and then they died. They smoked until their lungs were great useless bags of black paper and they die. They live in the wrong neighborhood and catch a bullet aimed at someone else and they die. They die and they keep dying.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Most days, I could handle it. Let it go, bitch to my friends, drink, laugh and forget.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">Not today.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">“Not today,” I whispered to her. “I can’t let you go, my dear. I’m sorry, I can’t let you go. I couldn’t lose another one.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “No capture.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Fuck this. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Randy, push two amps of bicarb. I’m going transvenous.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Randy beamed me a relieved smile. We were in the meat of it, we had Code fever, and he was as invested as I was. Randy was of strong Irish stock. He understood fighting but not giving up.</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">A transvenous pacer is a long, sterile wire that feeds directly into the ventricle. I’m running an electrical cable directly to heart, through her peripheral circulation.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> ***</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> TOHOKAMI! EMHITAME! </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> My Sensei looked hurt when I told him the news. I was leaving the dojo. I was a young man, and my blood was too hot to sit and meditate while the world was being formed. I wanted to roam, to rage, to live a life outside of the dojo. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> He told me that there would always be a place for me, but I knew that my place wasn’t at his side. It was out there. I still believed in the principles I had learned, but the dojo wasn’t my place to practice. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> When you finish Misogi, you start to make your arm swing in a arc half as large. Then half as large again. Then again. Then again, until your hand is completely still. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> I went to Israel, the land of the living bible, to learn my religion. I studied medicine. Then I went to the worst warzones of South Central and north Philadelphia to learn trauma and critical care. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> It sucked. I hated it. I hated the hours, the abuse by patients and nurses, the constant complaints and lack of sleep. It made me tough and hard. I learned everything I read in books, practiced it a hundred times, lost ninety-nine, tried another hundred. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br /></p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> TOHOKAMI! EHMITAME!</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"><br /></p> <p style="text-indent: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0in">***</p><p style="text-indent: 0.5in; margin-bottom: 0in">I could feel my own heart beat in time with hers. Fighter pilots get it when they’re pulling three Gs. Boxers get it when they’re punch-drunk. The sort of horrible focus that blocks out everything. I've got Code fever. Just me and her dead heart and my technology versus the cancer and the entropy that all things die. My hands were sweaty in the gloves. It seemed like the air was a hundred degrees. I slipped past the sweet spot again. My hands trembled.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> I stopped, and stood straight. Closed my eyes, calmed my breath. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> I could hear Randy’s voice quaver. “Doctor?”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> I relaxed my hand, and swung it to the side. In great arcs that became smaller and smaller. Smaller, smaller. Soon, my hand was still moving, but to any eye it was completely still. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Doctor?”</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in">I slid the electrode through. Slowly. With infinite calm.</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Capture!” Randy said. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Give me sixty at sixty, Randy. Sixty at sixty.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> A powerful pulse thundered through her body. It hammered against my finger on her wrist. Her color returned. She sucked on the oxygen mask. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Her eyes fluttered open. She was confused, sweaty and alive. She'd live for a few weeks, a few months. She looked at me and I thought she smiled. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “We’ve lost it. No capture,” Randy said. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Okay, I’m tubing her,” I replied automatically. It was a lifesaving procedure, I was good at it, I could save her. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Malek sighed. I looked up at him, and the fever broke. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “It’s not what we want, Big Guy,” he said. “It’s what she wants, remember that. It’s what she wants.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> I looked up at the clock. 11:55 pm. The code was over. It had been over for a long time, but I hadn't known it. I had fallen from the perfect crystalline rush of CPR and emergency surgery, mechanical ventillation and cardiogenic pressor drips, back to the world again. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Do you a religious man?” Elaine asked me, in a voice that could not have been hers. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Yes, Elaine. Yes, I am.” I said. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Randy looked up at me, waiting for my response. They all look at me. All movement stops. Each doctor, it’s our decision, but really, it’s her decision. I hang my head, and say those words I’ve said so many times. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Time of death, 11:55 pm.”</p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> A collective breath was let out. The drama was over. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> The crowd started to disperse. Monitor cables were folded. Gossip exchanged. I flicked off a bloody glove into the garbage, let out a long ragged breath and took in a new one. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> “Do you answer to God?” her corpse asked, with motionless lips and empty lungs. </p> <p style="margin-bottom: 0in"> Back in the ER, the patients were piling up. Headaches and runny noses and broken bones and heart attacks, waves of humanity that would never stop crashing on my shores. </p>erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-13034675636129246642010-06-19T11:02:00.000-07:002010-06-24T19:32:24.389-07:00Endings<h1><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size: 18px; ">Madame Ellie Mae Williams Davis began a tiny little poem</span></h1> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Six pounds three ounces of song</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Eyes of shallow waters</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">And pale simpering flesh</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">All others fell in her father’s eyes</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">At seventeen her stanzas broke hearts</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Brought grown men to weep</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Stopped Studebakers on </span><st1:street st="on"><st1:address st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Main Street</span></st1:address></st1:street></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">She drained malteds and Cherry Coke</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">And dreamed of a watercolor tomorrow</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">At twenty three she combined with another work</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Two verses together</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Forming a couplet</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">From them sprung little inspirations</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">At ninety two she is slender and willowy and white</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">She pants with tongue dry and cracked</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Back arching into me</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Spongy lungs engorged</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">She no longer leans towards tomorrow</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">She falls back to the past</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I watch her climax in front of me</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">She screams like a baby</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">“No no no no” horrible “no”</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">While she recapturing her youth</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I will violate her death</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I open her gates</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Insert the tube to feed her breath</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I pierce her with needles and pipes</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">When her poem ends</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><br /></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Endings are the most difficult part of any work</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">A return to the dominant chord</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">As the last echoes of her melody fade away</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I write</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">“Time of death, 3:15 am”</span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" align="right" style="text-align:right"><span><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">-e2k.7</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-78677227238217794502010-04-23T08:54:00.000-07:002010-04-23T08:59:54.967-07:00Different Eyes<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I: </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Ghosts, 2:03 am</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>I was standing alone in a room filled with ghosts. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>Talking. In complete silence. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="margin-right:0in;text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The fluorescents cast a pale white light around everything, a light that is meant to reveal but instead obscures. That kind of light can’t even pierce a sheet of paper. The ghosts were lying on steel tables, placed in neat rows. Their blue and gray insides were exposed, leaving their secrets bared. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="margin-right:0in;text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">They were souls that have not been put into the ground. Cadavers are not allowed to rest. Instead they gave up their secrets to me and my scalpel. As I dissected, I revealed everything in death that could not be told in life. Every broken bone, every clot, every pathology imaginable laid itself open to me. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="margin-right:0in;text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The conversation was bloodless. I asked questions with my scalpel and they replied with their flesh. There were no lies under the knife. Under the pale light, I revealed truth. Dirty, bloated, fetid truth. The truth cut me as much as I cut them. I would never be able to see pretty lies again. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="margin-right:0in;text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">All of the world I grew up with, the world of the known, the world of the accountants and Sunday football games and television and pro wrestling, they have all gone to bed. They rested peacefully with their delusions while I confronted reality. While they laid with their dreams, I interrogated ghosts. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="margin-right:0in;text-indent:.5in"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <h4><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">II: Elegant Machine<o:p></o:p></span></span></h4> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">“You have to understand, the bodies are just like cars.” Dr. Taitz had said in lecture that morning. “After the driver steps out of a car, only the machine and the chassis are left. There are no drivers here, just the cars. Just the machines are left.” This was our first and only introduction to working with dead bodies in medical school. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> Dr. Taitz stood in front of the the Anatomy Lab, a white and chrome room in the basement of the University of Tel Aviv School of Medicine, where we would be spending the better part of the next year of our lives. We were arranged in rows of seats in the auditorium, immobile, waiting for wisdom to be showered on us. Just outside the auditorium seats, a solemn brigade of cadavers surrounded us. Each was outlined by a harsh overhead light, covered by a sheet, and again by a transparent plastic shell that kept the smell from escaping. Like the boogie man under the bed, they waited silently, and perhaps we believed if we didn’t turn to face them they would disappear. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="margin-right:0in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> Dr. Taitz was a sports physician from </span></span><st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">South Africa</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">. He was squat and fit, and gave an impression of density, in incredible shape for 76 years old. He had treated the casualties from wars going back to 1967. Taitz’s job was to teach us about the upper limb, the arms and shoulder girdle. From the surface it seemed fairly simple but we learned quickly that appearances could be deceiving. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> Taitz believed that functionality was its own aesthetic. He saw the body as an elegant mechanism for work and play, and wanted to impress his beliefs upon us. He used a Buddhist method of teaching. Taitz was trying to let us reach for a higher level of understanding. “Don’t learn it, just know it,” was one of his least-liked phrases. Many thought he was mocking us. He wasn’t. He was trying to show us the way of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">satori</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">, true enlightenment, through Anatomy.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="margin-right:0in;text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">“Notice the elegance of the tendons going through the carpal tunnel.” He said, holding his own wrist, as if we could use X-ray eyes to pierce through his skin. He pronounced all his A’s as hard A’s. “Really amazing, isn’t it? The tendinous sheath keeps the tendons tight into the wrist. However, it can rub against the median nerve and cause carpal tunnel syndrome, like you chaps that are copying down every word I’m saying.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="margin-right:0in;text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Thousands of years of superstition wrapped each of the cadavers. Taboos about cutting dead bodies, causing the dead to rise from their sleep. Ghosts, ghouls, vampires, evil spirits. The Jewish tradition was to bury a body within twenty-four hours. Just by their very presence, the cadavers represented an affront to the religious among us. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="margin-right:0in;text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I had never cut a human body. I wasn’t sure if I could. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="margin-right:0in;text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Forget all of that, Taitz told us. They are just objects. They are just cars with the drivers missing. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Philosophically, Anatomy was rooted in strict materialism. Everything could be explained by some physical principle. Biology was just a concentration of chemistry which was really just a concentration of kinetic physics, which was nothing more than engineering. Doctors will happily explain your every thought and emotion by the preferential binding of one chemical to another due to microscopic electrical forces. No longer was the body a magical, impenetrable organ, now it became a complex machine to be understood in terms of kinetics and mechanics.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">“Okay, now, make your first incision,” Taitz said. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I lowered the knife to my cadaver’s skin. The first cut was the hardest. I wondered if he felt it. I wondered if they were just cars with the drivers missing.</span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">III</span></span></b><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">: </span></span><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Mediums, 3:03 am</span></span></b></i><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></b></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The ghosts didn’t have names. They had tags like 58E. They were white bodies on steel tables. Their individuality had been swallowed by death, but they were special people who had donated their bodies to the cause of science in a land that believed the body was sacred and inviolate. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">They were perfect and untouched except two cuts in the lower abdomen, near the genitalita, with white cloths sticking out. I never found out what happened there. My gloves were wet with cadaver juice. It bubbled and squished underneath my fingers.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyTextIndent2"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span>The interrogation had begun. Those who say dead men tell no tales never understood pathology. I was the medium who read their stories. Nothing in their lives would be safe from me. I could feel their stress in the hardening of their arteries. I could see the years of smoking in the blackening of lungs. 16 D had cancerous nodules in the lymph nodes of the neck. 45A had stiffening and shrinking of the kidneys. My own cadaver, 58E, had tiny clots in the vessels of his brain. I knew how he lived and how he died. My interrogation was precise, perfect, irrefutable. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">58E. I tried to name him, but it seemed somehow inappropriate. His eyes stared blue and sightless. He had a big bulbous nose, with brown-grey nose hair. His mouth was blue and dry, lying open like stuck in the middle of a snore. A cloth covered his head, concealing the empty skull. His brain had been harvested for neuroanatomy long ago. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">He didn’t really look happy, sad, or lonely. He was beyond such emotions now. My </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Sensei</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> said once that the face we are born with comes from our parents, but as we get older that face becomes all our own. Reflecting our personality. Through life, he had made his own face. In death, I would read it and try to find some truth. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <h4><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">IV: Known and Named <o:p></o:p></span></span></h4> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> We learned about the head and neck from Professor Rak. Rak was a warrior-priest for the cause of evolution, the knight for mighty Darwin himself. In the land of the living Bible, he preached the way of science. He had a set of skulls in his office, lined up exactly as evolution had molded them, from </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Austrolopithicus</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> to </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Habilis</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> to </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Sapiens </span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">after a short two million years. Those fetishes were part of his magic.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Rak was enormous. He was a huge man, solid as his namesake, and when he talked his arms would make enormous sweeps through the air. He was enormously intelligent, articulate, and thorough. He would make chalk drawings of key features of the skull. Here was the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">petrous</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> bone, the rockiest part of the body. He was the architect of the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">thyroid cartilage</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">, which forms the Adam’s Apple the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">cricoid cartilages</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">, and the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">arytenoid cartilages</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">, putting them together so that they formed the larynx. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> “It’s even more complicated than that,” was his favorite expression. For Rak, the kingdom of the skull was the seat for something greater. Anatomy was about control. Rak learned things and controlled them. I wrote down what he said, and then I would control that knowledge. Make it managable. Rational. Sorcerers and alchemists believed that every spirit in nature had it’s own secret name, and that by having that name, you could have power over that spirit. Over the elements, over time and space. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">One organism. Two arms. Two legs. A thorax and abdomen. A head. A penis, or a vagina. Sixty percent water, forty percent organic tissue. 216 bones, X arteries, X veins, X named organs composed of X types of tissue. A hundred billion neurons, ten billion hepatocytes, a trillion lymphocytes, ten trillion red blood cells. 75 trillion cells. 220,000,000,000,000,000 base pairs of DNA. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Over a thousand names to be learned, mostly in Greek or Latin. Almost a million details to be memorized and put into context. There were over four hundred points on the human skull alone. Known and named. I knew them all. Did that give me power over men’s minds? <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Magic is an ability to grasp the ungraspable, to have power over the elements and the spirits, the unknown. Scientific knowledge is in itself a kind of magic, a sorcerous power that physicians wield in order to perform their acts of healing. That knowledge is a different kind of vision. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <h4><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">V: </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Details, 4:50 am</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></h4> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I raised from the dead (next to the dead, that is) and stretched my aching bones. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I got a Coke and a Schnitzel sandwich from the vending machine, a glowing black box in the dark grey corridor. That was dinner. Or maybe breakfast. The more time we spent on other’s bodies, the more our own bodies were neglected. Fat people got fatter. Skinny people lost weight. We all lost our Tel Aviv summer tans, and were gaining bright white flourescent skins. Our skins looked like bones, as if the insides were starting to come out.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I shuffled back into the lab, sat down next to my textbook, and stuffed the sandwich into my mouth. Whatever taste it had was blocked out by the words on the page. I turned the page of my textbook, but the words blurred and twisted on the page. </span></span><u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Moore’s Clinical Anatomy</span></span></u><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> stood on top of a pile of books next to my lab table. Underneath it were several notebooks, the Washington Manual of Medical Therapeutics, photocopied lecture notes, Essentials of Orthopedics, pens and flashcards, and my portable computer. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">We had been studying at the </span></span><st1:place st="on"><st1:placetype st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">University</span></span></st1:placetype><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> of </span></span><st1:placename st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Tel Aviv</span></span></st1:placename></st1:place><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> for four months. Medical school had reached the ultimate level, finals week. While the summer sun faded, and clouds of winter erupted from the desert sky, we learned. For the past seventeen weeks we had been going to classes six to eight hours a day, to follow up with two to four hours of private study every evening. The sun had flown on golden wings across the sky while our pens scratched and pages turned. Now six exams that would gauge how well we had absorbed that information. They would be packed into fifteen hours over seventeen days. The moon would sail across the sea of night while we prepared. For every hour of lecture and studying and review, we would have less than a minute to show what we had learned. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The trick to taking medical school exams is not to know the material or know it well, but it to know it such that it could be recited in your sleep. My own technique was to read the book and listen to lecture, and make a manuscript of notes that was an omnibus all the material for that subject. Then I would recopy that manuscript, by hand, over and over again so I could copy it without looking at the original. I copied my notes onto flashcards and spiral bound notebooks. I copied into the margins of books and notes. I copied in the library, in the Histology lab, in the coffee shop, in the mall, at my desk, in my bed. I copied while watching TV, listening to music. I copied in my sleep. The scrawl of my pen was like the relentless machinery of the human body, flawlessly copying millions of base pairs of DNA every second. Every detail would be remembered, a thousand times over, because every detail might some day mean a life.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I looked down at my notes:<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top:0in;margin-right:1.0in;margin-bottom:0in; margin-left:1.0in;margin-bottom:.0001pt"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Two phalanges, proximal and distal, articulated by a saddle joint. Attachment for a total of seven muscles. Connects to the trapezium of the wrist by a condyloid joint. Powered by the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Thenar emminence</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">: </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Abductor pollicus brevis</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">, </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Flexor pollicus</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">, and </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Opponens pollicus</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">, which allow the joint to be abducted or adducted, flexed or extended, and opposed. Ennervated by the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">recurrent nerve</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">, a branch of </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">the median nerve</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> from the lateral cord of the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">brachial plexus</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">, from cervical spinal roots 5-7. Blood supply from the superficial branch of the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">radial artery</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">. Skin sensation from the cutaneous branch of the </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">median nerve</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">… <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right:1.0in"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right:1.0in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> All this for the thumb. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> This little structure allowed humanity to use tools, to step off the ladder of </span></span><st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Darwin</span></span></st1:place></st1:city><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">’s evolution and make its own rules. I had never believed the thumb could be so complicated. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-right:1.0in;text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Life exists in the details. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <h4><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">VI: Death<o:p></o:p></span></span></h4> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">In </span></span><st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Egypt</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> getting your own corpse means hiring a graverobber. In some places you buy a cadaver, some places you beg borrow or steal. In Taitz’s </span></span><st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">South Africa</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">, with only two major medical schools and hundreds of people dying every day, you get a fresh cadaver for every class. People don’t appreciate how lucky they are to have someone’s body to study from. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I have heard some wild stories about medical students and their cadavers. Apparently one guy put the cadaver in the passenger’s seat of his car, and used the extra body to drive in the car pool lane. The time-honored trick of putting a live person on a cadaver table had been repeated every year. Either flaunt your reaction or rebel from it, but you can’t deny that the reaction is there. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Understanding the pathology of death, the microscopic details that shift so that the well of life no longer heaves, is not the same as accepting the end of your own existence. It is something we never truly face. Either you obscure it with religion and superstition, or you rationalize it with scientific positivism. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">We all came to terms with death on the anatomy table. It had ceased to be abstract. Death would always be in the passenger’s seat. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent:.5in"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <h4><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">VI: </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Different Eyes, 5:45 am</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></h4> <p class="MsoNormal"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> My eyes were burning from formaldehyde. I walked out of the Anatomy lab into the spring night. The glowing dial on my watch read 5:45 am. The bag on my back hurt from its weight. It was like carrying a bruise. It seemed like it took a week to walk to my apartment. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> Walking up the stairs, I saw an old lady with her dog. She greeted me with a sweet smile and a ‘Shalom’. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> I didn’t know her name, or anything about her. She always smiled and said </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Shalom</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> to me. She always wore makeup a little too heavily, and brightly colored outfits that didn’t seem to fit her age, but walked with a reverence that came with age. I knew nothing about her, but with my eyes I could look deep inside her. I could see the muscles moving over bone, under skin. I could see right down to the most molecular level, the DNA unwinding and transcribing RNA that will make proteins that make life. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I had come on a pilgrimage to this faraway place, this cradle of the Western world, because I had eyes but I could not see. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">The masses only allow themselves to see the surface of things, without significance, without consequences. They will take out stock in a high-paying fund that supplies money for weapons-brokers that sell arms to </span></span><st1:country-region st="on"><st1:place st="on"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Iraq</span></span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">. For them a hamburger is meat on a bun, not ground flesh of lipids and peptides filled with bacteria, toxins and multicellular parasites. A sweating homeless man is an annoying inconvenience, not an alcoholic with thiamine deficiency and kidney failure producing renal frost. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Physicians see the reality of death, people at their worst, the lowest of the amplitude in the rhythm of life. As student-physicians, we will be exposed to the heights and depths of the human condition. As scientists, we see the causes and results of each folly of life. Innocence is forever barred from us. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">Like the microscope, I will see the most basic building blocks of life. I will penetrate the undefined </span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">arche</span></span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> split open, classified and quantified. Like the madman, I will break through that invisible veil that separates the artificial wholeness of the world to the pulsing pathogenic masses inside. Like the scalpel, I will slice open a curtain of carefully-studied ignorance and live in a world of practical realities which allow for no vanity or delusion. <o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText" style="text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">I can’t close my eyes pried open with knowledge. I will be forever set apart as the gatekeeper of sickness and health, life and death, as the one who sees with different eyes.<o:p></o:p></span></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><o:p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;"> </span></span></o:p></p> <p class="MsoBodyText" align="right" style="text-align:right;text-indent:.5in"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">-</span></span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:medium;">e2k</span></span></i><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-53174588270768070932010-04-08T13:47:00.000-07:002010-04-12T08:28:00.158-07:00One percent<p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">It’s Saturday night in <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">San Francisco</st1:place></st1:city>. I’m huddled into a doorway against the gentle rain, in the afterglow of a date, when a distinguished black man walks by me frenetically and says “Shit!”</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>“Sorry if I bothered you there,” he apologizes. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>“No problem,” I mumble, still trying to hit the little tiny keys on my Iphone. Illyana is a gorgeous Russian Jew with a nervous lip tic and red scarf. We drank Moroccan tea for eight friggin dollars a cup, stared into each other’s eyes and tried to pretend we didn’t meet on an internet dating site.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I look good in my suit jacket and black sneakers, a dot-com dress-casual clone, but apparently not good enough for a post-date kiss.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>[[Illyana, had a great time. You are beautiful and charming, and I hope to meet with you again.]]</p><p class="MsoNormal">The tea has an aftertaste of ash. The sky is wet iron, rusted yellow from the reflected lights of <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">San Francisco</st1:city></st1:place>. Rain patters the concrete, nips at the hem of my bluejeans.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>“Listen, sir, perhaps you can help me out,” he says. “My name is Roland Chase. I’m from <st1:city st="on"><st1:place st="on">Burbank</st1:place></st1:city>. I was driving up the coast when I was carjacked. They took my wallet, man.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Up close I can see that his salt-and-pepper beard is shaved very close. Clean leather shoes, but a cheap watch. Drier than one would expect for someone that had been carjacked in the rain.</p><p class="MsoNormal">There is power in details.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Before I moved to <st1:city st="on">San Francisco</st1:city>, I was a medical professor in <st1:place st="on">Brooklyn</st1:place>. I used to hold court in my ER, surrounded by medical students. Every patient was a learning opportunity. Mr. Johnson had eyes like my well-dressed supplicant. He was a morbidly obese man. He proclaimed to be allergic to nitroglycerin, which medicine for the heart, and the only medicine that would relieve his pain was morphine. What about the EKG, I asked?</p><p class="MsoNormal">The EKG is normal, a student told me. Her short white coat is pressed. She smells like Ivory soap and textbooks.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>And the intervals? I ask sagely. No one ever looks at the intervals on the EKG.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal">The intervals are the distances between peaks. When you’re hiking, no one ever talks about how long it takes to get to the mountain, but it’s all part of the journey.</p><p class="MsoNormal">“Listen, I’m not a bum, I’m a real estate broker, but I lost everything,” Chase says. “My wife and kids are in the car waiting for me. I can give you my watch as a deposit…”</p><p class="MsoNormal">I never give money to people on the street. Most of them use it for drugs, not food or shelter. I might as well give it directly to their dealer.</p><p class="MsoNormal">My phone blings a text.</p><p class="MsoNormal">[[Had a great time. Loved hearing about your adventures in <st1:place st="on"><st1:country-region st="on">Thailand</st1:country-region></st1:place>, and your views on stem cells. Next time I can show you the stairways of <st1:place st="on"><st1:city st="on">San Francisco</st1:city></st1:place> – Illyana]]</p><p class="MsoNormal">Ah, Illyana. Beautiful, educated, stylish. Snobby, priviledged, elitist. Potential but fraught with complications. Maybe fifty percent likely that I'll get another date, 25% chance that we'll actually start dating. What's the chance that she's the one?</p><p class="MsoNormal">I want to text her back, something witty and seductive, but the man’s need is burning in front of me. I can see despite his dark skin, his lips are white and trembling.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>“I called the CHP and they won’t help me. It’s only 12.87 for a can of gas…”</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>I’m pretty sure I’m being hustled. He starts laying it on thick, about how his wife or kids are in the car. I must seem like another kid on the town with more money than sense. I wish I had the grey hair to match my almost-forty years of life and centuries of cynicism. Clouds pout overhead. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>80% chance of downpour. 90% chance of scam. <span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>I’ve lost a lot of patience for street people, and I’ve lost a lot of patients in the ER. I’ve worked in the worst neighborhoods of South Central LA, Philly, and <st1:place st="on">Brooklyn</st1:place>. Sometimes they’d just bring dead people in, all grey and blue and colors that people shouldn’t be, and I’d pump on their chest for awhile and try to bring them back. I’d juice them with adrenaline, shock them with electricity, pump them full of saline and and plasma and blood, even cut open their chests to squeeze their hearts back to life. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Dead stays dead. When you don’t take care of your diabetes or your high blood pressure, you’re asking for reprisals. Crack cocaine, heroin and Mad Dog don’t make for good bedfellows. Dead stays dead. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>With every death, I lost ground. I lose heart. I lose strength. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>But I never lose kids, I used to say. No kids die in my emergency room. I had been beaten down, but I had drawn a line in the sand. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Baby Jessica was only eleven days old. She was tiny, small even for a newborn.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’ve eaten bigger burritos. Her mother said she wasn’t sleeping well. Her skin was grey and her arms lay limp at her sides, but she was still breathing. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>We took her to the resuscitation room. We put a tube down her tiny throat and pumped in oxygen. We gave her saline and sugar, fluids and antibiotics. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>We worked her for six hours.</p><p class="MsoNormal">She died at twelve days old. The intensive care pediatrician, a tiny little woman that could have been anyone’s mom, said I didn’t have a chance. One percent at best.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>“Sir, can you just help me out with a little something….” Chase pleaded with me, pulling at the sleeves of his coat like a junkie. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>One percent. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>I was in my final year of residency. I hated medicine. I hated the hours and I hated pumping on dead people and I hated trying to take care of idiots that didn’t care for themselves. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>They paramedics rolled her in, while she flailed in the throes of a seizure. She had just had a baby six weeks earlier, and her sister, stained with tears, told me she had been feeling depressed since then. She writhed around the stretcher, and the worst thing was none of us knew why. We pumped her full of sedatives but kept thrashing.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Her blood pressure falling. Her brain was frying in her skull. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>The bumps and lines of the EKG seemed like a trivial detail, but something was off. The QT interval was too long. Consistent with tricyclic antidepressant overdose. One of the most dangerous manmade toxins, caused unending seizures, a drop in blood pressure, and death. Turns your blood into acid. I picked up an enormous syringe of sodium bicarbonate. Baking soda in water. It is the only antidote. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>My attending physician, an insightful man with a child’s face and a shock of grey hair, shrugged his shoulders. He had seen too many grey and blue bodies, grasped at too many straws, to gain any hope. I saw my chance and took it. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>She woke up three days later, and admitted she had stolen the tricyclics from her brother. I watched her take the first steps of her new life. “My legs hurt,” she said. “Can I have a pain pill?” I guess I expected gratitude.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Every year on Christmas eve, I toast to myself that there is one less orphan in the world, one more mother at Christmas.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>Yesterday I saw a gallon of blood drain out onto my shoes while I struggled to keep a man alive after he flew off his motorcycle on the freeway. At seventy miles an hour, asphalt is like a grinder. I still scream at them “Don’t you die on me!” and yet they still do. Even children. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>I handed twenty dollars to my Mr. Ronald Chase, or whatever his name was. He who rushed off, his heels clapping wet pavement. Ninety-nine percent likely he was off to buy a 40 of Budweiser, crack or black tar heroin or whatever.</p><p class="MsoNormal">But maybe, just maybe, he would be filling his gascan and rescuing his family from a dark street on a rainy night. Maybe I’d get a second date with Illyana, and a third and a fourth, and maybe we’d fall in love and have kids and hold hands when we’re seventy.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="mso-tab-count:1"> </span>I have to believe in my one percent. </p><p></p>erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-70284146378801871702009-11-18T07:44:00.000-08:002009-11-18T07:46:44.152-08:00One morning in Barcelona“Eric, no puede dejar su bici aqui!” I hear, barely conscious. Rinaldo, my diminuative landlord, is tromping around my little flat having a hissy fit about the bike I bought yesterday. I pull the blankets over my head and hope he will go away. Only three days ago I was banging out overnight ER shifts in the hole known as Newburgh. <br /><br /> It has to be early, right? I think I was drinking last night. There’s light outside. My watch says 11 am. My Spanish class starts in two hours. Oh, yes, I was in the bar. Gran Foc, just off Plaza Catalunia, burnished brass and crushed red velvet. Antony was playing the trombone, and Martin was on the guitar.<br /><br /> My housemate, Berta, walks into my bedroom. She’s a German girl here in Barcelona studying in the university. “Don’t worry, he’ll get over it. Want some breakfast? I’m making tea.” She disappears into the kitchen, only a few steps from my bed.<br /><br /> Ugh.erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-67805310052818268122009-11-01T20:12:00.001-08:002009-11-01T20:16:25.688-08:00Lessons learned from the sabre-toothed squirrel<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEWEDZ27DUhKjUrML2-h7QyM3SrLwGS7drKAI8vaipyqlkhbH_NBurFoEbx2KMfurkzXNJ294ZE_dnQpSA1tw3YORFv435tRe1mB5ltRi_DtoiKY1dIvWsSOp8Ff-5YSDh83MMZ8fnm7d-/s1600-h/scrat2.jpg"><img style="margin: 0pt 10px 10px 0pt; float: left; cursor: pointer; width: 275px; height: 206px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEWEDZ27DUhKjUrML2-h7QyM3SrLwGS7drKAI8vaipyqlkhbH_NBurFoEbx2KMfurkzXNJ294ZE_dnQpSA1tw3YORFv435tRe1mB5ltRi_DtoiKY1dIvWsSOp8Ff-5YSDh83MMZ8fnm7d-/s320/scrat2.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5399355156241983778" border="0" /></a><br />Complete and total dedication to a task, with no thought of danger or self. Utter satori of purpose.<br /><br />I have much to learn from the saber-tooth squirrel.erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-87473882720897536682009-10-28T14:22:00.000-07:002009-10-28T14:48:40.068-07:00What should I do with my life?I'm having the hardest time trying to figure out what comes next in my life. I've been through so many hats: priest, writer, teacher, doctor. I feel like I've lived several different lives.<br /><br />Now I'm living the somewhat enviable life of a pensioner or trustafarian, with a stable medicine gig that allows me to work only a week every few months. I'm like a recessionista without the anxiety.<br /><br />I'm getting ancy. Now what?<br /><br /><br />I've considered a number of different choices for my future career/life:<br /><br />Adventurer! - learn how to kitsurf/climb mountains/track wild boars/etc and go around the world being bold, foolish and attractively useless<br /><br />Volunteer! - build schools in Asia. Clinic in South Africa, or here in California.<br /><br />Writer! - write down my innermost thoughts on a regular basis, publish occasionally, wear a black hat, perhaps start smoking?<br /><br />Filmmaker! - nuff said. Documentary films about medicine. Narratives about anything.<br /><br />Doctor! - go back into fulltime medicine. Become director of an ED, or hardcome academic medicine. Do a fellowship in Critical Care or Pediatrics.<br /><br />Student! - go back for an MBA, PhD in Literature or hardcore science, MFA in creative writing. Or just take general ed courses in art, literature, history, quantum physics, etc.<br /><br />Dilitante! - do some combination of the above very casually. - this is currently what I'm doing with my life, to greater or lesser success.<br /><br />All of them seem equally engaging, but I'm having trouble choosing. It's what I call the 'tyranny of freedom', which is both wonderful and overwhelming at the same time. It's been fantastic to really examine my priorities and what I want out of life. They include, in no particular order:<br /><br />Friends<br />Creative outlets<br />A girlfriend<br />Sensual delights - food, sex, beautiful surroundings<br />Play<br />Work - something worthwhile, fun and hopefully lucrarive<br />Adventure<br /><br />I hope that all of you know the joys and horrors of this kind of freedom. If you have any suggestions, let me know!erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-67756515111037110752009-05-15T13:42:00.001-07:002009-05-15T14:09:36.128-07:00Thumb-wrestling with deathMrs. Mayer was big, flushed and sweaty in a red mumu stained with vomit. She was having the big one. <br /><br />She asked God to watch over her family and closed her eyes. The monitors screamed as she lost her pulse. Her heart rate idled down. Her heart was failing. She had made her peace.<br /><br />I limped over to her stretcher and ground my knuckle into her breastbone. Hard. Her eyes popped open in pain and I gave her the eye. <br /><br />"You're not going into the light yet!" I shouted at her. <br /><br />Yes, I actually said it. <br /><br />I threw the kitchen sink of medications at her and called in the specialist. An hour later, the cardiologist sucked a clot out of her coronary artery and she survived. <br /><br />A few days later, it was a little tyke breathing like a hummingbird until his lips were blue. He had the million mile stare like he was giving up. I hit him with intravenous steroids, adrenaline and antibiotics until he pinked up and screamed his fury at me. Before that, the diabetic coma in septic shock. And so on. <br /><br />That was last week. Now I'm typing away in a little cafe in Budapest, drinking an espresso with Bacardi and ice cream... <br /><br />...wondering if I'll ever be able to give up the life I've left behind. I've been a teaching doc so long, giving residents the glory of the save, that I'd forgotten what it was like to thumb-wrestle with death.<br /><br />Can I give it up? Am I a living stereotype, addicted to the rush?erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-11662110924088610252009-05-10T15:36:00.000-07:002009-05-11T02:17:03.050-07:00The Secret to Eternal Life and Shameless Plugs<a href="http://tiffanykamerman.blogspot.com">Tiffany</a> and I made this short strip, so it's worth another plug.<br /><br />Was posted on Val's comic book blog: <a href="http://www.occasionalsuperoine.com">An Occasional Superheroine</a>. <br /><br />Probably best laid out on <a href="http://tiffanykamerman.blogspot.com">Tiffany's</a> blog.erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-86354909936456247002009-05-10T15:10:00.000-07:002009-05-11T03:25:24.645-07:00The First Day of the Rest of Your LifeI'm sitting in the old town square of Prague, a little after midnight. Lamplights shine bronze and blue against the grand black church which looks as it it was carved from volcanic rock and boiled in history. Teenagers drink beer at tables in the outdoor cafes. Tourists stalk delicately underneath the clock tower, waiting to pounce with Nikon-fu at the miniature dolls that pop out and dance at lunar intervals. A parade of drunken Russians wield flags and song celebrating a soccer victory. <br /><br />Here I am, typing away on my little computer, a million miles from the life I've left behind. <br /><br />I have escaped the rat race. I have been working my tail off for the past ten years on the little hamster wheel of modern life: work-car-work-house-work-marriage-work-children-work-death. Now I'm ready to reinvent myself. <br /><br />We'll see what happens.erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-8564922739539198742009-04-24T07:34:00.000-07:002009-04-24T22:33:57.352-07:00Bring back the dinosaurs<a href="http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/23/ep.facebook.addict/index.html">Facebook addiction?</a> Give me a break. <br /><br />Social network withdrawl. American Idol. Obesity and sedentary lifestyles. Depression. Modern day ennui. <br /><br />All cured by bringing back the dinosaurs. How could you be depressed because your-boyfriend-doesn't-love-you-as-much-as-he-loves-GTA4-<br />and-you-eat-becase-it-hurts if you were being chased by a Velociraptor? <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1BSkRtfvdOeaGl4QxoVw1shPdZysUgPebA0cnCgvcfAz7kNsvsXECy3p7lTiCX3kw48up6alJzYfszVUvXyifjWfKAtyyn3MQ5irWi4RLpsJiZ9sopKMRIgwHRhHRQnXCHIHqW9Ldhyphenhyphenxh/s1600-h/velociraptor.jpg"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 320px; height: 240px;" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1BSkRtfvdOeaGl4QxoVw1shPdZysUgPebA0cnCgvcfAz7kNsvsXECy3p7lTiCX3kw48up6alJzYfszVUvXyifjWfKAtyyn3MQ5irWi4RLpsJiZ9sopKMRIgwHRhHRQnXCHIHqW9Ldhyphenhyphenxh/s320/velociraptor.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5328267558212881730" /></a><br /><br />Think about how much better life would be? No more three hour phone calls from your mother complaining about your father not taking out the trash? No more telemarketers: they'd be eaten first. As proven by Jurassic Park, T-rex prefers lawyer two to one over the leading other brand of white meat. <br /><br />Think about it.erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-74461003109450538042009-04-21T08:00:00.000-07:002009-04-21T08:21:18.651-07:00The secret to Eternal LifePretty lame title for a short, but I needed something.<br /><br />Tiffany, sometimes med student sometimes artist, has illustrated this story into a cute little comic book.<br /><br />You can see it here at <a href="http://www.tiffanykamerman.blogspot.com">www.tiffanykamerman.blogspot.com</a>.<br /><br />The actual story is here: (note this was written about ten years ago, so it may seem a little outdated) <br /><br />THE SECRET TO ETERNAL LIFE<br /><br /> Old Man Time sat on the mountain, stroking his long white beard and grumbling. It was New Year’s Eve, and midnight was approaching. In the crook of his arm was the Great Clock of Time. It was shimmering white, a vibrant black hand. Gold numbers, from 1 to 365, were etched along the outside. The hand was vibrating, now past 365 and a hairbreadth from one. <br /><br /> Little Baby Time climbed up the mountain towards him.<br /><br /> The cycle of rebirth and renewal was as old as Time. Every new year, baby Time would come and take the clock of Time from Old Man Time, and start the new year. <br /><br /> Baby Time finally made to the top, panting, with a shit-eating grin on his face. He was wearing a pastel summer suit and mirrorshades. A CD-Walkman was on his belt, next to his pager and mobile phone. His hair was slicked back and there were gold rings on his fingers. <br /><br /> “So, daddy-o, ready to take the big plunge?” he said between breaths. <br /><br /> Cyber-punk little shit, Father time thought. These young ones, they have no respect for their elders. <br /><br /> The ancient one cleared his throat, took a deep breath, and stood up to his full, terrible height. His gaunt figure stood out harshly in the moonlight. His brow furrowed, attempting to summon all of the wisdom he had learned during his long life. “Let me tell you a story about responsibility...” His powerful voice echoed across canyons and valleys. The sky trembled and the clouds held their breath. “It is the same story that my predecessor told me before I took this important position. It starts a long time ago--”<br /><br /> Baby Time’s cellphone chirped, fracturing the moment. “Scuse me, dude.” He flipped it open with a flick of his wrist. “Hey, honey. Yeah, I’ll be with you tonight. Keep the fire hot for me, babe. I just got a little business to take care of. Call you later. Ciao.”<br /><br /> Baby Time turned off the phone and snapped his fingers. “Yeah, man, I hear what you’re saying. I can dig it. Fling me an email, give me a page, chirp me. IM, ICQ. We’ll do lunch. Now hand over the clock, gramps.”<br /><br /> Old Man Time looked at the young one with narrowed eyes, trying to summon great anger. Instead, he heaved a heavy sigh. His shoulders slumped, and he leaned more heavily on his staff. It was always the same routine. Gingerly, he raised the Great Clock towards Baby Time. <br /><br /> The baby smiled. Greed shone in his huge blue eyes. <br /><br /> Suddenly the old man pointed behind the child. “Look over there!”<br /><br /> The baby turned. <br /><br /> With a swift kick on the rump, the old man sent the baby over the edge. He watched the baby fall screaming and be swallowed up by the clouds. <br /><br /> “Sometimes the old tricks work the best,” he mumbled to himself. <br /><br /> Chuckling, he picked up the clock and wound it backwards to one. <br /><br /> “Gets ‘em every time. How do they think I got to be so old?”erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-1068556803510261342009-04-21T07:55:00.001-07:002009-04-21T07:59:45.657-07:00It's got to be the Percocet talking...So, a few days before I head out to the new life, I decide to make a clean break from my own decrepitude and have surgery on my bum knee.<br /><br />Turns out that the nagging knee pain I've had for years, which has prevented me from playing sports and running and recently even hiking, is a tiny mensiscus tear. It's true, doctors are the worst patients. My orthopod stuck a needle in and sucked it out. The procedure took an hour. I should have done this years ago!<br /><br />My knee's swollen to twice it's usual size. I've spent most of the past three days lying on the couch. Writing, no. Watching movies and Facebook, yes. Whenever I have to move I hobble around with a cane. I'm used to be the energetic one. Now I dread having to go to the bathroom.<br /><br />On a brighter note, Percocets are fun. Especially when mixed with alcohol...<br /><br />But soon I'll be a real boy again, able to hike and run and play sports.erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-66796532824745987752009-03-26T07:53:00.000-07:002009-03-26T07:55:24.124-07:00The Dork Knight Rises Again<p class="MsoNormal">Okay, this is officially crazy. I’ve been accepted to the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. It’s a big deal. Some of the other attendees are already professional writers, been accepted to Writers of the Future and making money for their words and all sorts of adult stuff. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I still feel like a kid beating on his computer because he’s not satisfied with the way the world is now.<span style=""> </span>My life feels like a script of Harold and Kumar that never made it off the slush pile. My personal timeline looks a little like this</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">I’m born: Hello, world! Smells like chicken!</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Young Man: Thank god that school thing is over. What should I do next? Ah, I know, I’ll subvert the dominant paradigm and become a Taoist priest!</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Five years later: Ack, being a priest is hard. Let’s go to Korea. It’s on the other side of the world. That’s why everyone’s standing upside down! Wow, you’re a beautiful girl. Let’s get married. Why not? Publish a book of poetry. Too bad the economy collapses, I’ll just have to….</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Next Year: …go to grad school. Hello black berets, black coffees, bleak attitudes. Make a literary zine. Ride a motorcyle. Crash the motorcycle. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Two years later: Medical school? What? In Israel? Stop shooting at me! Where’s my gas mask? </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Four years later: Emergency medicine training in South Central LA. Gangers and rappers, stop shooting each other! I can’t pull the bullets out fast enough!</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">A thousand bazillion years later: Medical training finally over! No more hundred hour weeks. Time to be a real doctor, have a car and a house and a spiffy white coat. Hey, our film was accepted at Cannes! Let’s take a whole bunch of films and try to be a producer! </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <p class="MsoNormal">Soon after: Wife left me and took my money. No big deal, got so much to do. I’m a flipping medical professor now. Studies to publish, students to teach, articles to present. Working in a clinic in Guatemala, backpacking Thailand. And being single in New York City….</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p> <span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman";">A million of your attention spans later: Clarion Writer’s workshop. What?<br /><br />So, I'm taking a leave of absence from my cushy job, traveling Europe, and I'll try to be brilliant enough to justify my admission. Oh, gotta go, hearts to mend and wounds to heal.....<br /><br /></span>erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-67522463956463158282008-12-17T18:51:00.000-08:002008-12-17T19:00:44.493-08:00<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><span style="">SEVEN DAYS<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;" align="center"><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style="font-weight: bold;">The First Day</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p style="font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">I am no neurochemical engine simple and clean</span></p><p style="font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">no jellied goo of cells and molecules, impulses and streams</span></p><p style="font-style: italic;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:85%;">for I am the gaunt spirit in the haunted house<br /></span><span style="font-size:85%;"><o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:85%;" >the doomed ghost in the mortal machine</span><span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Go, Drew, go!” Joe Bob shouts from the padded sidelines. He pumps his fist in the air to the tune of Billy Ray’s Achy Breaky Heart, which makes his belly wriggle under Scully’s face on his ‘X-files, The Truth is Out There” t-shirt. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">It’s Friday night at the Wilshire. I have a mechanical bull between my legs, a beer in one hand and a stirrup in the other. The crowd is a rolling sea of cowboy hats and bleach blonds, shouting and cheering me on. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I’m invincible. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Okay, Bessie,” I slur, patting the leather side affectionately. “You’ve thrown me every Friday since I popped my cherry, but not this time. Not tonight. Do you hear that?!”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Are you ready?” the pimply bull operator asks in a tired voice. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Let’r rip!” Joe Bob bellows, smacking the bull-guy on the shoulder. The operator shrugs and turns a little dial. Bessie starts to spin. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Ride bull, drink beer!” I shout. The first buck is easy, slow. I relax my hips and roll with it. This is going to be cake. A little beer slops out of my glass. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Ride bull, drink beer!” Joe Bob echoes. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Ride bull, drink beer!” I repeat like a mantra. I bring my beer to my mouth when the second buck slams into my rear. The mug catches me on the nose and splatters beer all over my face.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Beer shower!” Joe Bob shouts.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Beer shower!” I mime, spluttering through blood and beer. I hope my nose isn’t broken. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Ride’r, Drew. Ride’r hard!” Joe Bob yells. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The third buck throws me a little sideways, but I’ve still got my beer and my bull. A sloppy part of me notices there’s one last slug in my mug. I aim my lips for it. A small part of me realizes this is one of those moments that I shouldn’t be thinking like a drunk. The rest of me aims for beer. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Ride beer, drink bull!” I shout happily. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Ride beer, drink bull!” Joe Bob shouts. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Ride beer, drink bull!” the crowd replies. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Bessie turns and reverses her spin. My stomach flip-flops and threatens to cut loose but I’m not paying attention. My lips reach towards my mug. With a exultant thump, Bessie hurls me into the air. A few bitter drops touch my lips and I smile in triumph. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The air is so clean, so cold. I have only a moment to swallow my victory. Then the ground smashes into me. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The crowd roars in laughter. Everything is spinning as I lie on the padded sidelines, blood running from my nose, beer in my hair. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“It was so worth it,” I mumble into the nougahyde.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Joe Bob lumbers out onto the pads and hauls me to my feet. Joe Bob’s six feet tall and at least two-fifty of towtruck-driving meat and blubber. He has a Mac truck baseball cat, bushy black sideburns and moustache. He studies rocket science at the community college because he have the money to go to Nashville or a real university. When he’s not drinking with me he’s staring at his telescope imaging life all the way out there, and he’s been my best friend like forever. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Ride beer, drink bull, buddy,” he says, chuckling. “Good try.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“One more time,” I reply. “One more time.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“No way, Drew, you’re done for the night,” Joe Bob says. He uses my shirt tail to wipe the beer off my face.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">My cell phone rings. I try to get it out of my pocket a few times, then Joe Bob sighs and fishes it out for me. He puts it to my ear.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Adrien?” A smoky voice says. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Mila?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Call me Dr. Sanborn,” she hautily replies. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Uh, sure.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“You should come to the hospital right away.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I look down at my legs. I don’t think they’re getting me anywhere anytime soon. Joe Bob shakes his head. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Sure, why not?” I slur. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">***<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The Neurology Intensive Care Unit at East Tennessee Baptist is white and cold, even though the room is always kept at twenty degrees Celsius. It’s no longer called the Coma Ward, but that’s what it is. Rows and rows of people hooked up to softly blinking machines, waiting to wake up. And me. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I have a towel around my neck and an icepack on my nose. Sobriety is creeping up my legs and infiltrating my brain. It tells me I’m gonna be one gigantic hurt in the morning.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The plaque on the door says Dr. Mila Sanborn, MD. Chief of Neurology. Mila sits back in her leather chair and flips opens my file. The file is filled with consult forms, CAT scans, EEGs, MRIs. Every test known to man. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Your psych profile,” she says, pulling out a typed sheet. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Dr. Mila Sanborn is regal and sluttish, with long loose greying hair and a strong jaw. I first saw her on the back cover of her book Magnets and Memory, number seventeen on the NY Times Bestseller list. I have a problem with memory. If it’s one thing that could get me out of the Wilshire on a Friday, it’s an answer to my memories. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">She reads the consult through bone-rimmed glasses. She pushes her glasses up her nose and clucks her tongue in that annoying way she does when she’s frustrated.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Hmm,” she says. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I’m not crazy, am I?” I ask in a nasal voice. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Your…extraneous…memories are not internal dissociations or psychosis,” she replies.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Mila, this is Adrien. I don’t speak Martian.” I say. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“You’re not crazy. You may be receiving transmissions from little green men.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I hold my head. “Arrgh.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Mila flips my file closed with a flourish, gets up, and leans across the desk from me. Her face is inches away from mine. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“The brain is a strange thing, Adrien dear. Its not just a lump of grey meat that transmits electricity. It’s more.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">If only she knew.<span style=""> </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">I remember hot lights burning down on me. It was the Lighthouse Café in San Francisco, and the crowd was jazzing to the cool honey tones of my tenor sax. Jack Kerouac smoked a cigarette in the back row. He wore a dirty plaid shirt, and his eyes had the lazy sheen of morphine. I finished my set with a twitter and a honk and bowed my head, sweat pouring down my face. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“Ladies and gentlemen,” the MC shouted, “Give some love for Cameron Grey, the hottest sax in nineteen sixty eight!”<span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Which is impossible because my name is Adrien Priest. I’m a file clerk from Kentucky, and I was born in sixty nine. I live in a tiny house with pink plastic flamingos in the front yard, carpool to work with the same guys I happy hour at the Wilshire Pub, and fish on the weekends. I can’t have those memories but I do. I’m pretty sure I’m not crazy. So I’ve been seeing Mila as a patient for the last few months.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Mila crosses around the desk and stalks towards me. I back up, back way up, because I know what’s going to happen next. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Now I get it. You didn’t call me on a Friday night to go over test results, did you?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Clever boy. Come here my dear,” she beckons me with a crooked finger. Mila is as fascinated with my body as she is my mind. Something about abnormal brains turns the greying doctor into a feral Siamese.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">There are bloodstains on my shirt and I smell like sour beer. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“You’ve got to be kidding.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Grr,” she purrs, making little cat claws with her hands.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Aw, don’t do the cat thing, jeez.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Mila stalks forward. I step back into a patient’s bed.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“What about her” I reply, feeling a little bashful next to the crinkly little lady in the white sheet, attached to tubes and wires.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Oh, Mrs. Lubowski? She can’t hear you,” Mila says with a dismissive wave, unbuttoning the top button of her blouse. “She’s been </span>coma for the last forty years. Just look at her.”<span style=""> <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Mrs. Lubowski </span>is a white body in a white sheet surrounded by white machines and white walls, the only color a tiny gold heart-shaped locket around her neck. A plastic tube in her neck feeds her breath, and IVs snake in her arms to give her fluids and nutrients. She’s a local legend, a woman who’d been in a coma in the same bed for forty years. She’s our own little Rumplestilskin who will never wake up. She is a woman with no hope.</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">But her eyes are open. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Ice blue, cataract-stained eyes, rimmed with gelatinous discharge, stare boldly up at me. I jump back in horror. </p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style=""> </span>“I am looking, Mila. And she’s looking back at me,” I stammer. </p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style=""> </span>Mila looks down and sputters. “Mrs. Lubowski?”. </p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Mrs. Lubowski sits up with a creaking of old bones. Monitor wires pop off and machines scream their alarms. Mila steps back, awash in shock. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Mrs. Lubowski?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Mrs. Lubowski turns to her, and then to me, her eyes wild with freedom.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Mrs. Lubowski, you must lie down.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Mila tries to push Mrs. Lubowski back in bed, but the little old lady resists her efforts.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Adrien, could you give me a hand here?,” Mila pleads. “Adrien?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Adrien? <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Who is Adrien? </span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">She is talking to me, but I don’t recognize the name. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I look around the room with new eyes. A hospital with white walls. Rows of patients hooked up to machines. A stately doctor in grey and a beefy nurse in green wrestle with an old woman. A strange tableau to wake up to. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I look down at my hands. They are brown and young and strong. My body feels loose, unhindered by age. A good body. I run my hands through my hair as if for the first time. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Whatever awakened Mrs. Lubowski seems to have awakened something in me as well. I am seeing my own life as a biopic on late night television. Adrien Priest, early thirties, college washout, lacksidasical file clerk and perpetual friend, enamored of greasy spoon cuisine and mechanical bulls, loved by many but known by few. I might as well be reading a chart on myself. Whatever I am, Adrien is only a small part of it. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">A Twix candy wrapper pokes out of Mila’s bag. I snake it, peel it open, and pop a chocolate covered cookie in my mouth.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Mrs. Lubowski, you need to sit back down!” Mila bellows. “Hey! Dennis! I need some restraints here.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Dennis, a sweaty armed dude in inappropriate pink scrubs, pulls out some leather cuffs and tries to put one on her arm. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Mrs. Lubowski refuses to comply. Her entire body trembles with the effort of moving. Her right arm flaps out like a living thing with a separate goal, and that was to escape the emaciated body it was attached to. The left still lay limp. She speaks, or really forms her cracked lips around silent words. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“My… name…”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Mila, Dennis and two other nurses surround Mrs. Lubowski. Each have a leather restraint in their hand.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“is…MISS…”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Dennis pins her left arm. Like a snake, it slithers away. The part of her brain that controls its movement had been destroyed years ago by the stroke. It is a creature of its own. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Lubowski.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She pushes against them with the right side of her body. Dennis flies back and tumbles over an IV tray. Mila bounces off a wall. Ms. Lubowski’s strength and will are amazing. She keeps the staff at bay with half a body while summoning the concentration to finish her sentence. The left arm continues to flop around like a fish. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Her rheumy ice-blue eyes darken. </span>Blue shifts to violet. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>When someone moves towards Twilight, the eyes change in a different way. Ice blue darkens to hard metal indigo. Soft brown hardens to black. A Doppler shift. When a celestial body is moving away from you, the waves appear longer, so they shift towards the red. When a body is hurtling towards you, the waves seem shorter and thus towards the blue. Twilight is a blueshift. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>She is not moving away. She is coming closer.<span style=""><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I casually perch the second cookie stick between my teeth like a cigarette while I amble over to the chart rack and open Ms. Lubowski’s chart. It reads like a library of death and disease, thicker and bloodier than a Tolstoy novel. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The first page was from 1969, when she collapsed during a demonstration. She was put in the hospital for a stroke. Her hospital stay was complicated by pneumonia and sepsis. Five months later, she had another stroke and was completely paralyzed. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She fell into a persistent coma. During her vegetatitive state, she had suffered from infections of her lungs, kidneys, and heart. Each time she was meticulously treated and cared for until she recovered, but she never awoke. Her bowel had been obstructed and then atrophied from lack of solid food. Her muscles dwindled away, her bones brittle. Bedsores leaked pus onto the sheets. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Her doctor had done everything he could, except let her die. He was one of the old school that didn’t believe of end-of-life rights. He had the power to keep her body alive so he did so, without real thought of the consequences. He had retired three years ago to a beach in Fort Lauderdale. She had no living family, no friends that could be contacted, so her care fell in between the cracks. She had been waiting to die, and refused to comply. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Mila had inherited her a few years ago. For the first few months she had tried everything. Amphetamines. Cold water baths. Electroshock therapy. Then she gave up, like her predecessors before her. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I…am…”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">A ventilator inflated Ms. Lubowski’s lungs every four seconds. A tube in her stomach fed her nutrients. She was like a plant, a vegetable in the purest sense. She was fed and watered and hoped to die. We had the power to keep her alive but not the wisdom to let her go.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“not…married.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Her right arm pushes away a skinny resident. He stumbles backwards and knocks over a cart full of medications. The staff scrambles away to help him up. Meanwhile, Ms. Lubowski sits up completely. With her right hand, she grabs the trach tube in her neck and rips it out. Blood runs down her gown as she looks up at me. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I lock her gaze and her history spills out in my mind’s eye. Before the stroke, she had been a schoolteacher. One the first to try to end segregation in Tennessee. The KKK burned crosses on her lawn, kids threw stones through her windows, fellow teachers avoided her as she were possessed. Both her sons had died in wars: first WWII, then Korea. She had always been a pariah, a woman of vision. She looked right at me and I saw the fire that had sustained her for almost a hundred years.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“You. Help me up.” She says. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I wipe cookie crumbs off my face and help her to her feet. She is a little wobbly. The trembles in her left side ceased. Slowly, surely, with her left hand, she touches my face. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Mila looked at Ms. Lubowksi, then at me, aghast at the sudden calm. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“What is your name?” she asks. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Don’t worry about that, Miss Lubowski,” I say. I have had many names, Adrien and Cameron and others, but I sense none of them are the truth.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Call me Victoria,” she asserts, and shakes my hand. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>When she learns my real name, she might not be so friendly. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>***<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I get home late to an empty house. The flamingos look like their sleeping in the dark. I crack open the front door as if for the first time, flip on the light and look through the ruins of a life. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Dirty socks on the floor. Unwatched Netfliks DVDs on the TV. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Inside the closet is a shoebox taped with duct tape. I pull the tape off and photos inside fly everywhere like escaped doves. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I let them lay where they fall, standing in the middle of a life. Photos of fighting fires as a reservist with Joe Bob. Sailing on the lake with Eileen. On the bull at the Wilshire. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I flip open Adrien’s cell phone and press 911. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Hello?” the operator answers.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The gas can burbles as I spread gasoline liberally across my former life. I drop the phone in the middle and light a match. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Hello, are you okay?” the operator calls out. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I drop the match. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <span style=""><br /></span> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Second Day</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>…I remember standing in front of a microphone at the steps of Sproul Hall in Berkeley. Banners of tattered cloth, young men and women in tie dye and full of hope stand in front of me. “Out of Palestine”, “Free Lenny Miller”, “No troops in Cambodia” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>The microphone squawked feedback. National Guard troops stood at the edge of Bancroft, rifles in their hand. A woman with cornstarch hair whispered in my ear. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Just talk to them, Cameron. Make them understand.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I nodded. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Don’t be afraid. They’re people, just like us,” I said into the mike, trying to catch their eyes, soothe their fears. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Then the tanks rolled forward. The water cannons started to spray, then the screams…<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I try to hold onto the memory but it leaps from my fingers like a half-forgotten dream. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">This morning I found myself drawn back to the ICU at Eastern Baptist. I have spent the morning sitting at Ms. Lubowski’s bed, watching her sleep. The staff bustles around me, oblivious to my presense, because I won’t let them see me. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Mila had warned Ms. Lubowski that going back to sleep was dangerous. She pleaded with her patient take stimulants in order to stay awake until they could safely determine that she would not drop back into the coma. Ms. Lubowksi refused and slipped into graceful rest. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Three specialists have come in from Nashville, a neurologist, a neurosurgeon and a intensivist. They form a tribunal in the corner of the room. They pore over her chart, her CAT scans, her EEGs, trying to determine the nature of her miracle. They pull at their beards and use big words to try to decant order from mystery. She frightens them. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She frightens us all. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Her skin is looking pinker today. The bedsores stopped oozing. Perhaps it is a trick of the light, but her flesh seemed fuller. The valleys between the bones of her hand seemed as if they were filled again. It is if she had awakened from her own decrepitude. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">She speaks without opening her eyes. “Don’t think I don’t know what happened. A woman knows.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“What do you mean?” I ask.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“About the coma. That I’ve been sleeping for forty years,” she says, opening her eyes and turning towards me. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Like Rumplestilskin.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She laughs and pats my hand with a trembling arm. She seems so peaceful. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“It must be a hell of a thing, Miss Lubowski—“<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“—Victoria—“<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“—Victoria, to wake up like that after thirty years,” I say. “If I were you I’d be in shock. I’d scream. I’d cry.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>“Thirty years…I can’t believe it. They kept me alive just because they had the power to do so, not because it was the right thing.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I nod. Power and wisdom do not always coexist.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I feel like it’s still 1969. I know it’s not, but I feel like if I turn on the television I will see reports from Vietnam, or JFK’s face, with Nixon behind him.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">…We waved our banners and shouted, “We will not give in!”. I heard a rumbling which sounded like a division of cavalry but instead it was tanks with water cannons knocked us down. We crammed up against the walls, being pulverized by the water. Then they fired tear gas. My eyes watered but I vowed not to run away. A rough policmean’s hand laid itself on my shoulder, and I remember looking down at a puddle in the wet asphalt, seeing the glittering sun cut into a hundred shards…</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“Everyone I’ve ever known is gone now, either dead or moved on. I’m alone.”</p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“How do you know?” I ask. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She doesn’t answer. She runs a hand through her hair. Thick grey strands fall off in her fingers. “It is a horrible place.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“The ICU?” I asked. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“No, the coma. It’s a room with no doors or windows. Sometimes, I could feel time passing. I could hear conversations, of doctors, of nurses. One day two of them made love right over this bed, as if I didn’t know. I can still remember the feel of her skin against mine.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I raise my eyebrows. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“It was probably twenty years ago, dear,” she says, answering my unspoken question. I redden. Mila and I had christened that bed only a few weeks ago. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I don’t get. Your treatment hadn’t been changed in ten years. Why did you wake up? Why now?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I don’t know. I think I’ve come to a sort of a conclusion. An answer. Perhaps I’ve walked all the green paths that we go to when we lay down and I’m tired of walking. Perhaps I’ve simply slept long enough.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She sighs. “I need to get out of here. To go home. Help me up, will you?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>With the popping of joints like dusty twigs, she sits up in bed again. She leans over and gracefully puts the silly grey hospital socks on her flaking feet. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I turn to look at the ICU staff, expecting the shouting and the melee that would follow. They all seem to be swirling, suspended in slow motion, like cream disappearing into coffee. Time has shuddered almost to a halt.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“What the…” I say, flabberghasted. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Let them feel what it’s like for a change,” she chuckles, and then coughs up a wad of dry grey phlegm. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I take her hand, and she slips her arm in mine. We amble slowly down the hallway. The hospital staff, the patients, the world is frozen. A bald headed child in the chemo ward throws a ball which hangs midair. A nurse washes her hands, water beads like crystal, suspended in time. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Her easy power is incredible. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Dangerous.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She talks as she ambles, “The coma was like that. At times the world would be like a movie, flickering in slow motion. Then it could speed up, and it took years just to get through one day. Then, at times, I would freeze into terrible immobility. I couldn’t tell if days, years, weeks, it was as if time just left me alone for awhile. And yes, there were the dreams.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I dreamt of strange things, of donuts with wings, and angels made of old tires that burned with strange fires. I guess that sounds silly, doesn’t it?” she blushes, and immediately looks twenty years younger. “It was a another prison, a horrible prison of colors and sound.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I can’t imagine,” I say sympathetically. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">We cross the street and made our way down the boulevard at a snail’s pace towards the house on the end of Mulberry Street. Time has found its way again. Onlookers stare over their sunglasses at a young man leading a old woman in a hospital gown. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She cocks an eyebrow at me. “Maybe I’m just a silly old lady, but I think you do understand.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">***<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Indeed I do. Adrien Priest doesn’t, but I do.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Time is the most terrible weight imaginable. To live thousands of years with the same guilts, memories, fears and lusts is simply too much pressure for the mind to cope. We are limited, in a certain sense, by our consciousness. There is only so much that can be experienced, and after awhile, Time’s weight simply overwhelms us. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Some call it the Dreaming. It is an extended madness where we lose ourselves to the demons within us. All of us eventually fall into the Dreaming, sometimes spending centuries wandering in delirium. In that state, we have been called prophets and madmen. Rasputin and Nostradamus, Caligula and Cassandra, to name a few. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The Dreaming doesn’t have to be a delirium. It can be a delight.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The first time I felt the pull of the dreaming I had been conscious for nine hundred years. I was tired. I regressed deep inside myself, in a state of partially suspended animation. My subconscious created a new personality, grew a new person within me. That person lived its life without knowledge that it lived in the body of an immortal, and carried the seed of milennia deep within its subconscious. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">My consciousness was suspended in the infinite sink between microwave and infrared. I was just a virus on an electromagnetic wave, a plasma ghost unhabiting my old shell. Like watching a movie. Like birthing a child. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I have seen Adrien Priest grow out of his ‘birth’ as a young man, with prefabricated memories, into the man he is today. He made friends, lost others. Bad choices and good. Picked a life and tried to live it. I’m always nostalgic about seeing them go. In this way, I have been generals and soldiers, constables and thieves, shepards and scientists. I have been the man behind the curtain for so many lives…<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">There were other advantages. My shell personality had it’s own unique aura. My enemies could not use their powers to find me. The Summers had reason to fear, and the Winters retained hope. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I can no longer count all the people I have been. It’s impossible to describe the feeling, to have been so many people, to have lived so many lifetimes. What was it that the Buddhist said to the hot dog vendor? <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Make me one with everything.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <span style=""><br /></span> <p style="font-weight: bold;" class="MsoNormal"><span style="">The Third Day<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Morning light splashes across dusty tiles of the dilapidated kitchen in the haunted house at the edge of town. This is Knoxville, and so when Victoria went into a coma the house was simply left to rot. The family fortune was funneled into the machines that had kept her alive, eventually dwindling away, but the old house was never sold. They just called it the old house on Mulberry Lane. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The timbers, long eaten by termites, groaned and creaked with each changing of the seasons. Windows had been broken long ago. Sparrows chittered in the overgrown willows that surrounded the lot. Like Victoria, the house had aged while Knoxville had grown up around it. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">This morning I had swept up the broken glass, cleaned up the kitchen a little bit, restarted the old refrigerator, did a little shopping, and tried to make the place livable again. My cellphone kept vibrating while I was playing house. Joe Bob left four messages, Mila three. I didn’t bother to check them. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Victoria ambles down the main staircase with cantankerous grace and a radiant smile. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Let me cook you breakfast, my dear,” she says. “As a reward for your chivalry.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Some reward.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Victoria is a terrible cook but a charming hostess. Her eggs are wet, her toast dry, and her coffee tastes like bark. She uses far too much salt. Worse, every time she spills salt, which was not infrequently, she would toss more salt over her shoulder.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.5in;"><span style="">I read from the paper to her, brushing salt out of my hair. She doesn’t<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style="">listen to me so much as she watches me, the wrinkles of her face softened through the coffee steam. Her presence keeps me here, vibrating, blue shifting myself into the hot infrared. I am sucked in by the magnetic pull of smothered passion. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">A Palestinian suicide bomber killed fifteen in a pizzeria in Jerusalem. The Israeli response was to capture the Palestinian headquarters, the Orient House, killing soldiers and civilians in the process. The Palestinians were enraged to see the Israeli flag flying in their territory. Fifty more swore to be suicide bombers on the spot. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>NATO approved a partial deployment of peacekeeping troops to Macedonia. Ostensibly, they came to disarm the Albanian rebels, who had been fighting against the Serbs to stop the ethnic cleanings that had taken place in the former Yugoslavia for five years. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyTextIndent">In her world, JFK and Jackie sip Mint Julips in June springtime in Camelot. Demonstrations rage across Berkeley demanding free speech for all. Kent has been desegregated, Korea has been liberated, the Cold War and Vietnam are hot and Afghanistan is not.</p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>In her world, Smallpox has been eradicated and all infectious diseases are going to be cured. In our world, Tuberculosis, hepatitis and AIDS are on the rise. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I try to explain to her so many of the good things: the rise of the Internet and global consciousness, environmental protection, civil rights for gays and minorities. She doesn’t understand. She doesn’t want to understand. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>In her world, when something isn’t right, you change it. In our postmodern world of infinite interconnections, we realize that to change one thing means changing everything, and meddling usually causes more trouble than it solved. Making new antibiotics creates resistant strains of bacteria that were nastier than ever. Throwing out one dictator means another one took his place.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Nothing has changed,” she says. She folded her wrinkled white hands on the table, peppered with liver spots. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“What?” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I have spent my entire life trying to bring right to the world, but I’ve never been strong enough,” she says. She looks down at her hands, the hands of an old woman. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“You were always strong, Victoria. You never gave up, and you were an inspiration for your students and everyone around you…You remember little Ricky Konstandikos? He’s a senator now in Milwaukee. Your students have gone on to become doctors, teachers and leaders….”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Also car thieves, lawyers and alcoholics, I’m sure.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“You can’t win them all. But you tried, and you cared, and in the end, I believe that’s what matters.” It is hard to imagine such strength in such a withered body, just a bundle of sticks that smells faintly of molded flowers. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Most of them are probably old or dead by now. Dead, and all their enthusiasm is dead as well. My sons are dead, my ex-husband long dead, all of my friends dead and lost. My house is empty. I have a new life, and no one to share it with.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I butter a piece of dry toast to within an inch of its life to give it flavor, then hand the knife to Victoria. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“You have me,” I said. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She looked down at my hand. “Giving someone a knife can cut a friendship. You should know that.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I laugh, pure and strong. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“You must think I’m a superstitious old lady,” she chuckles. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“So give me a penny for it and I’ll stay.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Not for long, dear. You won’t stay long. You’re on the run.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I don’t ask how she knew, or try to deny it. I just nod.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I’ve awoken in a new world, alone,” she says sadly. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I know how you feel.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Of course you do. I see your light. You can use that light to change the world. Make people understand what a gift that this life is. Make them love each other.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“You can’t make people do anything, Victoria. What you’re talking about is exactly the thing that I’ve fought against my entire life. People have the right to choose.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“There has to be a way.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I can’t do anything but look at her face. Her tiny, sticklike body is lit with emotion and energy. She is reborn, and she wants to share it with the world. She reminds me of myself, so many years ago. I am in love. I know it, and I think she knows it as well. She is a relic of the past, frozen for an age and then revived again fresh and rejuvenated. Like me. She is a hundred year old woman who had lived for only sixty years, and I am a three thousand year old plasma phantom living in the body of a meat puppet.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">A magpie lands in a treebranch outside and cawed raucously. She glimpses it and then looks back at me with mischievous eyes. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“One for sorrow, Two for joy, Three for a girl,” she intones.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Four for a boy,” I say, against my better judgment.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Five for silver,” She replies. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Six for gold…”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoBodyText2" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Seven for a secret, Never to be told,” she answers. “You still haven’t told me your name.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>***<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>My name is unimportant. It changes from time to time, in different places and different guises. I'm not so arrogant as to think of myself as eternal, but I've been around for a long time. I was born when mankind just started to crawl out of his tents and take a fresh look at the world.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I’ve been called a god, an angel, and a demon, but I’m none of those things. I'm not immolated in fire or living on Olympus or racing around the underworld on a chariot of shadow. I am a creature of blood and bone and desire. I spend most of my time in libraries and cafes, in hospitals and hotels and offices. I make mistakes and I learn from them. I've been on the battlefield and in the bedroom, and I'm smart enough to know which to prefer. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I am not all-powerful as you might think. I understand how to use the Light, but I prefer a nine millimeter to summoning fire, and I’d rather use Internet than a scrying pool. My race does not grow decrepit with age or disease, but we can be killed. Mostly by each other.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>My race calls itself the First. Millennia before Einstein, Bose and Heisenberg descovered the quantum nature of reality, we had learned to tap the Light for our own uses. Matter and energy were games we played as children, time and causation were tools for contemplation. We broke the curve of spacetime to suit our needs, bent geometry and used sacred math to weave the world in our image. We were arrogant enough to believe ourselves to be gods. We certainly convinced Man. There have been thousands of holy books written about us. Even me. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">At the dawn of civilization we ruled man by influence, by signs and portents and omens. Holy men interpreted our messages and spread them to the people, rulers waited breathless for our signals. With our benevolent guidance, we helped the young race get on its feet and learn about the world around it. We were the invisible hand that crafted a society from scattered tribes of barbarians in the forest. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>However, eventually every child must learn to survive on its own. Three thousand years ago, I tried to convince the First that mankind had grown into adulthood, and should be free to set its own course of salvation or destruction. Free will. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Many of the First disagreed with me, and believed that mankind still needed our help to stay in an eternal Summer. The others that followed me were called the Winters. Disagreement became anger, and words quickened to action. There was a mistake, as all wars are started, and we turned against each other. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>We lost the battle, myself and the Winters. Our rebellion failed, and we were cast from the fold. As is the case with all losers, we were written as the villains of history. Now I’m a guerilla fighter against the Radiant Host, a revolutionary hymn in the Worldsong, a thorn in their side that prevents them from moving with impunity. Mostly, I’m just a scapegoat for all of the evil that happens in the world. When a child dies, when a crop goes bad, whenever evil is done, I am blamed. My name is spoken as a curse in a thousand languages. </span><span style=""><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Now I remember everything. I know who I am. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">To the native Americans I was Coyote, Raven, or Snake. To the Europeans I was Reynard the Fox. In Africa I was called B’rer Rabbit. I have been Loki to the Norse, Enki to the Sumerians, Socrates to the Greeks. I have been the Monkey King and Saint Sebastian. </span><span style="">So I don't go by those names anymore. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Just call me Lucifer.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <span style=""><br /></span> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Fourth Day</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Sun glancing off the floorboards tickles my eyelids. I get up off the couch, stretch, and pad across the floor to the kitchen. Pour a glass of orange juice, take a big sweet gulp right from the bottle, and stretch enormously. I love to feel the muscles warming up for the coming day. Love the tang of orange across my tongue. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I grab a big handful of birdseed from the cupboard, pad out to the porch. I plop down in the rocker on the porch. I scatter birdseed, sipping at my OJ. Sparrows and pidgeons swoop down. Their little heads bob up and down happily. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Little moments.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">A magpie lands on the bannister, too arrogant to join the feast. He eyes me. Something’s wrong. The magpie flaps away, cawing. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The moment is over. I raise my hand against the early morning glare. An engine roars and tires screech. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Joe Bob’s F150 tears around the corner. It’s white and peeling in places, with old oversized tires. It hops up onto the curb and grunts to a halt on the lawn. I hear the crank of the emergency brake, and the creak of the shocks as Joe Bob steps out. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I should have known this was coming. He’s too smart to fall for my little pyro trick. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Drew, what the heck has gotten into you?” he shouts across the unkempt lawn. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Good morning to you, Joe Bob,” I reply. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Everyone thought you were dead. I finally figured it out,” he says with a wistful chuckle. ”People still talk about when you stole the governor’s toupee in Nashville. But burning down your own house? Stealing an old woman out of the hospital?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I fold my arms across my chest and shrug. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Joe Bob climbs the steps to the porch and towers over me until he’s eclipsed the sun. His tepid breath smells of last night’s whiskey. There are black rings around his eyes. For most people around here, that might a fight last night. For Joe Bob, it meant he spent the entire night with his eye plastered to his telescope. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“What’s gotten into you?” he repeats. “What are you up to?” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I shrug. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I’m okay, Joe Bob. There are some things I’ve got to do.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>He squints his eyes and looks down at me, trying to pry out the truth. He sighs. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“All right,” he slurs, laying a heavy hand on my shoulder. “All right. You just take care of business, Drew.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I will, buddy. I will.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Joe Bob walks back to the F150, shoulders slumped, and drives away. I walk back inside, climb the steps to Victoria’s bedroom. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Victoria has disappeared, and I see a young woman lying on her bed in a bank of new-fallen snow. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>When I look closer, I can see that the beautiful girl is Victoria reborn. Her recovery is complete. The hole where a tube had penetrated her neck is gone. Underneath, her new skin is pink and smooth as a baby’s. Her face has lost all of the lines and creases, and taken on its original shape. <span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>The withered old woman that had gone to sleep in that bathrobe has disappeared, the beauty from inside had surfaced and returned to her flesh. The snow is actually flakes of old skin and coarse grey hair, the crysalis of her former self. She is a sweet sixteen reborn.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Good morning,” I says. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""> </span>“Every morning is a good morning,” she says, getting up and kissing me on the cheek. She stretches like a cat. I try not to stare at her long bare legs underneath the short nightshirt. She is short, but for some reason she does not look small. Her waist-long golden hair runs down her back and shoulders like a waterfall of dawn sky. She has a fresh open face with a slight nose and rosepetal lips. </p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style=""> </span>“I’m not in the mood to cook. Go out for breakfast?” she asks. </p> <p class="MsoBodyText"><span style=""> </span>Thank all that is holy. </p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>We walk to a little café I knew a few blocks away. She takes my hand, and leans her head on my shoulder. I feel my heart race, and my mind fumbles for something to say. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Victoria gawks like a tourist at the new storefronts and sleek cars. A man passes who seemed to be talking to himself. I have to point out the Bluetooth reciever on his ear and explain cellular phones. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“The town is completely different now.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“That building,” she points to a warehouse, “used to be the firehouse. That’s where I met Matt. He looked so handsome in his suspenders and helmet. But we never married, even when I had Lauren. Living in sin was the last straw for me. I was an outcast in Knoxville. So I never tried to fit in after that.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“About Lauren--” I say. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“--I know. Car accident.” she nods with ancient sad eyes. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She sighs. I don’t bother to ask how she knew. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>We turn a corner onto a side street. On the corner is a school of bright red brick, with white columns at the steps. St. Vincent’s Catholic School. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Victoria’s mouth hardens. “And that was the school I used to teach in. Back then, I had first through third grade in the same classroom. After Kent State, I thought I would be brave and try to desegregate my classroom. The whole town flew into an uproar. I wasn’t just an outcast, I was a troublemaker. The kids broke my windows. I got threatening phone calls.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“This café used to be a truck stop. Maureen was a waitress there. She was one of my only friends.” Victoria sighed. Of course, Maureen was probably dead, or if she were alive, she wouldn’t recognize my beautiful Victoria.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Now, it’s a yuppie cafe.” I say. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Yuppie? Is that a kind of dog?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I laugh. Victoria is wearing my old sweater and shorts. She smiles brilliantly, her eyes laughing with me. She puts her hand on mine, and it feels right. Too right.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“They’re all gone. They’re gone, and I’m here.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I have to believe you’re here for a reason. You woke up for a reason,” I eye a waiter passing by a steaming plate of eggs and bacon. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I’m famished. Want to stop here?” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Victoria looks up at me with those too-bright blue eyes. “Sure.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“See, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you—“ I say, and then freeze. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I spy Mila’s grey-crowned head in the back of the café. Her body is taut, alert. She turns up her head to look at me, and a spark passes between us. Something more than jealousy. Something older. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I take Victoria by the shoulders and turn us both in the opposite direction. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“On second thought, maybe we should eat in,” I whisper in Victoria’s ear. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I can feel her smile on my cheek.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The walk home is quick and breathless. As soon as I close the door she is already unbuttoning her shirt. I can’t help but stare as she glides towards me. She moves as if she never really needed to touch the ground. I can’t help but notice the subtle movement of her hips beneath the nightrobe, or the rocking of her breasts. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">She grips me with frantic strength, her fingers bruising even my protean flesh. Her thighs are like a vice, her need unstoppable. Something about her aching vulnerability unlocks the passion in me. Her kisses are violet sunbursts to my bronze fire, her embrace diamond to capture my ambergris and water. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>As we make love, the vines in the garden writhe like a bed of snakes. Soon we are covered in green and living things. I finish quietly, shuddered against her as she murmurs sweetness into my ear. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">We lay in the bed, the setting sun sending rays across our naked bodies. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I turn to watch Victoria sleep. As her chest moves in and out, her hair lengthens growing like a vine. The fine down of blond hair becomes a pool. I untangle myself from her, and walk towards the window. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I can see a transformation unfold over the old house at the end of Mulberry Lane. The dirt on the porch clears away. Oil paint peels off to reveal a shiny white coat underneath. The leaves are blown away by a strong wind. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The vines grow everywhere, climb up the walls. They cover the bed and surround Victoria’s sleeping body with a hundred embraces. The Garden of Eden has returned. I pick up an apple from the counter and flip it over in my hands. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Victoria is bright, too bright, a shooting star that can not smolder but must burn across the night quickly and be gone. But even shooting stars have their uses, and I have been waiting for her for a long time.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I look at my reflection in the apple’s shiny red skin. My front teeth crunch into deliciously cold flesh. What role will I play? Will I be Adam, or will I be the serpent? <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <span style=""><br /></span> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Fifth Day</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I nurse my morning coffee daydreaming of lives past. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">…Cameron Grey became one of the youngest tenured professors in the English department at the University of California at Berekeley. He first got involved in the Free Speech movement to try to pick up girls, but ended up being a key part of the movement. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Cameron used to play the saxophone from his fire escape on Friday nights while the moon raged overhead. The haunting melody shook complacency from his students, who would stare at the ceilings and dream of better tomorrows… <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Victoria’s hands on my shoulder bring me back to the present. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“You’ve always been behind their eyes, love, watching and waiting through so many lifetimes. Waiting for the right time.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I looked up at Victoria with alarm. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>“Now I understand what you were trying to tell me yesterday.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She slid her narrow hips around me and sat on my lap, wearing only one of my shirts that barely fell midthigh. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I can see inside of you. Lucifer. The morning star, the lightbringer. Greatest of the Radiant Host. Cursed because of pride and love of humanity. Lover of freedom.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She knows. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“You’ve been waiting for something. A sign. A gift. Well, I think your prayers have been answered.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I smirk. “Delusions of grandeur don’t become you, my dear.”<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I can restore your dream. For years I fought against old mores, old traditions. Now I have the power to break them all.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She takes my head with both hands and turns my gaze towards the garden. The weeds grow in lacy patterns enfolding everything. Life crawls and calls, warbles in the trees, spreads among the fallow. “Like this, the world.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“You don’t know how many times I’ve heard that, Victoria.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>“Here. Let me show you.” She grabs my hand. I try to pull away, but she is too strong. Keeping her eyes locked with mine, she puts my finger in her mouth, slowly, erotically. A sharp pang of pain, almost like that of regret, and blood wells from my finger. Victoria bites her fingertip; a tiny drop of blood grows.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She puts our fingertips together, and our blood merges. In the swirling reflection of that tiny drop I can see an entire universe being born.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>My perceptions shrink down to atomic size. I can see electron probability clouds around nuclei of atoms. Then our focus narrows into an individual electron. I can see an entire universe inside. We shoot into a spinning galaxy of light, shrinking further, until we’re approaching a blue planet orbiting a yellow sun. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Victoria flies beside me in a gown of shimmering white. She reaches out for my hand. I pull away. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Did you create this?” I ask. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She shrugs childishly. “I’m not sure. Perhaps. Perhaps it always existed and I’m just looking at it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She spreads her power and I see a strange green fire flashing across the surface of the planet. Genesis. She is creating a new world. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Stop!” I shout, “Stop it. This is crazy! You have no right!” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I can’t stop her. I’m not sure she can stop herself.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>We are no longer looking into an electron in a drop of blood. Victoria and I fly down to the surface of the planet, watching the plants rise up and the seas fill barren rock. Flowers and trees stretch towards the sun. Animals emerge from the sea and walk on land. I start to see a familiar pattern. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">She isn’t making a new world. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">She is recreating Earth.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I watch animals growing and changing, adapting to thousands of centuries of new conditions, Darwin’s evolution as a one-act play. Pseudopods become fins, then become legs. Four legs change to two. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>As the Earth flashes underneath us, we see modern history reenacted.<span style=""> </span>Civilizations arise. The Mongols charge across Asia. Rome swells and then falls. The bubonic plague ravages, and then the Renaissance springs forth. I see the great societies of the day, the brash and blustery Americas, sedate Europe, tangled and passionate Middle East, contemplative Asia. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>We continue to tumble downwards, shooting stars burning on reentry, until we stand on a cloud overlooking New York City. The UN building is a ugly grey slab directly underneath. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>We stand on top of today for a sheer still moment. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Are you ready?” she asks. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Hell no!”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>A golden flash emanates forth from the center of the UN.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“A moment of clarity, a lifetime of plenty. All have what they need and desire. Leaders step down. Corruption ends. All fields bloom. Hunger ends, disease is forgotten. Possessions become meaningless.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I shake my head. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Beware of your wildest dreams, Victoria. I have seen this foretold before by the Summer Host. You want to bring the Rapture.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The golden light spreads outward like a wave across the world. In its wake is change. Ruin and pain disappear. The air smells of honey and wine. Trees hang heavy with fruit.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“You think you’re the first to try to save the world, dear? Old hatreds will not die easy. Brother will kill brother, and the cycle of death will continue regardless of cause. Even in a perfect world, where everyone has enough, there will always be those who want more. They will form new governments, juntas, crime rings. You can’t excise darkness by getting rid of the reason. Human weakness doesn’t need reason. It’s the curse of free will.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She counters. “Even the greedy ones can get everything they desire. I will give it to them.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Thus the old Chinese curse: may you get everything that you wish for. You try to push them into peace too quickly. You make yourself into a tyrant, a monster.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Your way is too slow, old man.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Suddenly we are sitting in her living room again. Sunlight falls on hardwood floors, the willows creak gently overhead. Her eyes are sad. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“So, this means nothing to you. After all of those years.” She relaxes her fingers, and lets the drop of blood fall to the ground.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“No!” I shout. I thread of Power to stop it’s fall. It hovers in front of me, my own face mirrored tiny in red. I crystallize it into a tiny marble, and put it in my pocket. Safe. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I lock eyes with her. “You little…child! You can’t create something and then just throw it away. You are forever responsible for it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Victoria looks stunned. “It’s only…”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“A drop of blood?” I shout. “No, not anymore. Not after what you’ve done.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Then I feel it. A strain like a migraine shoots across my head. The Radiant Host carrier wave focuses on me. I feel like I’m in the crosshairs. They’ve found me. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Victoria, we have to go,” I say.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“What? Why? <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I don’t have time to explain.” I can feel the static building behind my eyes. They’ve got me pinned like an insect. They’re trying to block me from translocating. They’re coming. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Well, I’m not going anywhere until you do,” she says, crossing her arms. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I scan around the room for weapons. No machine guns, holy swords or nuclear warheads. Nothing else is really worthwhile in a fight between angels. This is not going to go well.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Fine. It’s about time you learned of the truth.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Yeah,” she replies sarcastically, “What ‘truth’ is that?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“The world is more than at war with itself. It’s not just the plotting of white-haired men. The greed of humans is not the source of the world’s evil. It is the Summer Host.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Victoria raised an eyebrow. “I’m listening…”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“The old gods still rule from within. They manipulate, they wait for their turn to enslave humanity, Yahwe the worst among them.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Yahwe? You mean the god of the Old Testament.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Exactly. Her.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Her?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“It is only because she still rests in the Rock of Ages that we can even have this conversation. They will come after you. You may threaten everything they believe in.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I still remember Yahwe’s placid smile. She was naked, arms spread out welcoming, frozen at the tip of the glacier at the tip of the world. Underneath her a thousand Winters trapped in the ice, their faces twisted in silent screams, their wills capturing hers, keeping her in the Dreaming. If she were ever to escape…<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Just because I played Rasputin and came back from my coma. Stranger things have happened…”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“And stranger things will come to pass. I won’t lie to you. I had plans for you, big plans.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I know, my dear,” she says. “But I have plans of my own.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>A slender leg kicks the door in. It spins lazily in the corner. Mila stands in the doorway, magnificent in her anger. She has a shotgun cocked on her hip and ancient gunfighter eyes. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Lucifer, step away from her,” Mila commands in a dark voice. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Mila, I’ve never seen this side of you before,” I say, eyeing the back door. “I think I like it.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I should have known that Mila would be involved in this. The Summer Host have always had their syncophants. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Your honeyed tongue won’t get you out of this one, Lightbringer.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I knew that her gaze looked familiar. How is it that I hadn’t known for so long? My blood, my brother, my enemy ever since the failure of my rebellion. The hunter. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Gabriel?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Gabriel, the archangel who had brought Koran to Mohammed, Gabriel who had been the right hand of Yahwe, stands there in the body of Mila.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“We…you…naked….ew! You’re my brother!”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Mila flushes. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I shudder. “ I’m open-minded and all, but that’s a bit much even for me.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Mila restores her self control.<span style=""> </span>“Yes, Lucifer. I don’t know what brought us into the Dreaming together, but somehow we have come here to the same place, for her.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Her? You’re not here for me?” I ask. “I’m hurt.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Get over yourself, peacock. I’m here for her. The one.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>That’s impossible. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“No. I don’t believe you. She can’t have escaped.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Mila shakes her head. “Not in the way you imagine. Before you captured her in the Rock of Ages, Yahwe pulled off a single eyelash and placed it in my keeping. That eyelash grew into a part of her. She was only a shard of the great one, but she has been growing into so much more.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I have been watching her for centuries. She grows and dies in the Dreaming like we do. After your last confrontation, she passed into the Deep Dream. Something happened while she was there.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Victoria clears her throat, hands on her hips, indignant. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Excuse me, folks, but I’m in the room, you know. You can talk to me.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Mila turns to Victoria. “Yahwe, my lady, come with me.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I’m not Yahwe, Gabriel. My name is Victoria Lubowski and I’m not going anywhere. I have work to do.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I don’t think I’m going to like this. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I’m going to save the world,” Victoria says simply. “From idiots like you.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Mila snarls. “It is as I feared. She has become corrupted living with you. In order to preserve the integrity of the Host, she must be destroyed.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Mila’s stomach bulges. Victoria and I take a step back. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Mila looks down in horror, and lifts up her shirt. An enormous eye looks up at her. Another eye bubbles out of her chest. She screams until feathers force themselves out of her mouth, extending into enormous wings.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Gabriel has shed his physical body. He is a whirlwind of a thousand eyes and a thousand wings, and he is growing. When he reaches his full magnificence he will be as tall as the sky, with an eye and a tongue for every man and woman on earth, and when one of his eyes closes someone will die. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I can feel the carrier wave grow taut as the Radiant Host arrives. Energy shells expand and invert themselves as sungates open. They boil in pure indigo light, dripping with warped timethreads and cracked probability.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Gabriel. Azrael. Uriel. Greatest of the Seraphim. My brothers, my enemies. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Azreal is a stitch in the world, a black aching rift, a crack into the heat death of the Universe. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Uriel, the Fire of God, is a towering tempest of burning sand. Billowing flames arced out from the blistering rock of the deserts where time began.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“She is too dangerous, brother,” Gabriel broadcasts on the upper cosmic. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“She threatens Summer,” Azreal’s voice is deeper into the ultravoilet, barely visible on the edges of human vision. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“She threatens everything,” Uriel finishes in quick radio pulses. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I reach sideways with my right hand and withdraw Malagar, the ruin of a thousand empires. The black, etched blade had been forged by the Cold Ones aeons before recorded history in a method now lost. My left summons the pale fire of the Withered Sun, a fragment of the words Yahwe used to destroy Soddom and Gomorrah.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Stand back, brothers. This can only end one way.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“The Dreaming has unmade you, brother Lucifer. You still are trapped in the flesh. Open yourself to the Light and remember.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Remember? Remember what? <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Remember,” Gabriel says, and shows me what I have been trying to see. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">San Francisco, 1906. Our greatest confrontation, the one that set all of the city alight in its fury. Being with wings crowded the skies. Lightning clashed as Summer was set against Winter. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I absorbed the nascent energy of humanity and stood in front of the fury that was Yahwe. Incredibly, I managed to defeat her. Together, we set Yawhe in the Rock of Ages. Many of my brothers sacrificed themselves to keep her trapped in stasis. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">1969, seeing the sun broken as a thousand glittering shards on the wet pavement.<span style=""> </span>I was at Sproul Hall. Winter was reaching the peak of its strength. The concepts of civil rights and free speech were becoming part of the global vocabulary. Summer had been waning ever since the McCarthy era. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The tanks and troops attacked the crowd. I locked eyes with Victoria and through her to the essence underneath.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I can stop this,” Victoria said. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“You can’t. You have to let it happen,” I said. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I won’t—“ she said. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">She raised a hand glittering with power, and I prepared my defenses. Her first strike lashed out--<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Victoria waves a hand and the memories fade. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I can feel your power,” she says. “I can also feel your fear. You don’t want change. Well, you don’t have a choice anymore. Lucifer and I are going to make the world right.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The Radiant Host pauses. Victoria looks at me expectantly. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“What?” she cries. “I thought you wanted to change things?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I shake my head gravely and take a step backwards. Victoria’s eyes flew open in shock.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Lucifer?”<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I’m sorry, Victoria. I am old enough to remember the ranting of Yahwe as she wanted to enslave the world to make it perfect,” I turn my head to the three perfect storms. “I’m also old enough not to pick a fight I can’t win. Make it easy, brothers.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>The Radiant Host turn their terrible gaze towards Victoria. She takes a step backwards, eyes wide. They shred her nascent shields, wrapping time and causation like a fist. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Victoria screams, clutching her head, as the Radiant Host tries to unmake her. All of the windows in the house shatter at once. My eardrums burst. I fall to the ground, stunned.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Victoria is a newborn sun of energy. I can see now that she is Yahwe reborn. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Victoria shakes off their causal spike and steps forward. She reaches into a single eye of Gabriel, ichor squirting down her arm to the elbow, and twists. With a snap of everything, Gabriel is nothing. The shadow of his presence edges like hot lightning afterimages on the retina of my mind’s eye.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Azreal turns his mind into a spear. He blasts out a stream of horrific images, like an octupus spilling ink. Delicate water lilies and bloated fish corpses in a pond filled with chemical waste. Paint smeared across a canvas by the bodies of young lovers. The bite of a sword through the belly, delivered with the hatred of a brother to his only sister.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Victoria steps bodily into the heart of entropy and forced a crack into it. Reality splintered as her light razed Azreal’s darkness. With the tinkling of shattered glass, the Angel of Death was no more. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Uriel blossoms to twice his former size. My skin cracks at the volcanic fury. He becomes a lava tornado, twisting mean and fast. He turns towards Victoria with a howl of vengence and dove. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Instead of driving him away, she sucks him in. She breathes in the fires of the rock and eats them. The cloud funnels down into her mouth and disappears.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Gone. <span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Three of the greatest of the Radiant Host destroyed. Victoria turns her gaze to me. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Is this what happened forty years ago?” she asks. “Is this how we got where we are now?” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">First heartbeat. I open my hand and the shotgun flies into it. I fire three shots, one in the neck, and three in the heart. Each shot a sure kill, yet I was unsure that she could be killed. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>None of the pellets reach her. In between milliseconds, the gun had turned into a solid block of crystal. I open my hand to let it fall. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Second heartbeat, I leap forwards and bring Malagar down in a cruel arc. Its sorcerous program was designed to disrupt energy patterns. The runes on the blade drink magic and kill gods. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Victoria catches my wrist in her hand. With a twist of her arm, the bones in my arm shatter. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Third heartbeat, I block the pain and unleash the Withered Sun. Fire burns in my belly. The flames lick up from my mouth and nose. I belch a torrent of lava at her. The inferno plays across her skin like delicate fingers, dancing along her flesh. Her clothes burn off, leaving perfect naked skin.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Fourth heartbeat. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“That’s quite enough, Lucifer,” she says with the tone of an angry schoolteacher. “I’ve known fear and I’ve known hatred, and sometimes they aren’t one and the same.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I can feel Yahwe inside me, beating, but I am not her. I can feel the kingdom that you once shared. I can also feel you will never, ever again see the way that I do. You break my heart.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">She kicks me in the chest. I fly backwards into the wall, boneless. My ribs snap like dry twigs, spine twists. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Now I’ll break yours.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">She walks up to me, glorious in her naked beauty and power. She lifts my limp body with a bittersweet smile. Her tiny hand curls into a fist, and she rams it through the center of my chest.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">My heart explodes. The Dreaming finds me again.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <span style=""><br /></span> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Sixth Day</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The city of Knoxville is surrounded by green dark Smoky Mountains. A mist comes up from everywhere and settles across the trees like a great quiet carpet. It hides the secret sounds of fish wriggling through rocky streams and echoes of children playing in the shadows of giants.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Joe Bob rolls his pickup on the lawn again. He jumps out angry. The sun rises hot behind him. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I’ve had enough of this crap, Drew. Come out of there.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>The house on Mulberry street is quiet. The willows creak in a subtle breeze. The front door is missing. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Buddy?” Joe Bob says cautiously as he walks in the empty doorway.<span style=""> </span>He sees the door half-broken across the room, and catches the smell. Blood and shit. The smell of death. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>He finds a broken body laying on the hardwood floor of the house on Mulberry street. It’s neck is twisted at a horrible angle. There is a hole in the center of it’s chest. The bladder and bowels had loosed themselves. Effluvium oozes across the floor. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Drew? Drew!”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Joe Bob picks up the body. The head rolls to the side bonelessly. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Oh, shit, Drew. What did you get messed up with?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Joe Bob pulls out his Blackberry to call 911, but he knows instinctively that there’s nothing that the paramedics and doctors can do. He blinks back a tear, wipes it off with a greasy hand. It falls down onto Lucifer’s corpse. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>A code is unleashed. A pulse sounds in the void. From somewhere within, a spark ignites. Flames leap across the body, consuming flesh to the bone. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Joe Bob steps back in awe. Instinctively he clutches the cross at his neck with one hand, beer forgotten in the other. A greasy smoke stains the ceiling as the body burns bright red and orange. Ash piles on the floor.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>A mouth opens inside the ash. It screams as flames shoot from its mouth. A head emerges, then arms lifting upwards towards heaven. The body straightens itself, makes a cry like a cat, filling its lungs for the first time. At full height the body looks like a bird, with beak open and wings of flame outstretched. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>The flames die away, leaving a naked me. I shake off the ash and look at myself. Reborn from the ashes again. Hurts.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">My real heart is hidden away safely in a granuloma in my right tenth rib. It is a semi-aware regeneration kernel a few microns across, compressed with all of the information required to recreate my physical body. I’m pretty sure Victoria knew she couldn’t kill me this easily. I hope she knew. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Drew?” Joe Bob whispers. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I crack my neck and hack out a wad of bloody phlegm. Thankfully there is a pair of pants thrown over a chair in the corner. I pull them on and smile up at Joe Bob. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“No, Joe Bob, not Drew. Not anymore.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">He shakes his head in disbelief. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Something’s come over you, Drew. Somethin’ fierce. I’ve never done seen you like this. Abducted? I’ve been seeing lights in the skies. Followin’ them, them UFOs. They got you, didn’t they?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I shake my head. We lock eyes. I can see him searching me for something familiar. He can’t find it. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“That crazy doctor woman did it. I’ve heard what they can do with those MRI machines.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I look up at his eyes and find hot fear, fear of the loss of his best friend. I almost wish I could be that friend for him. A thousand easy lies come to my tongue but are left unspoken. I let my head hang. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“It was the memories, wasn’t it?” he says sadly. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I nod.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Remember Mitch? Ma Geldoff called you, Adrien and Mitch the three musketeers. Remember Tukesegee lake the summer of 05, the rowboat incident? Adrien said he’d never forgive you for putting fish in his underwear.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">My eyes get misty. I can remember it in bits and flashes, but I can see Joe Bob reliving every moment, and I want to live it with him. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“He did, buddy, he did.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Then remember what happened to Mitch after the War? He got back from Iraq and you were afraid to look him in the eye. He jumped at every car, watched every corner.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Joe Bob nodded slowly. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Everyone changes, Joe Bob. Everyone changes. Adrien isn’t dead. He just isn’t here anymore.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I flash him a bittersweet smile. You don’t live thousands of years without getting a little sentimental.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I’ll miss…him.” Joe Bob says. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“No, you won’t,” I reply.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“You’re not going to…” he whispers. “Kill me?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I grab the beer from his hand, drain it with a single long pull, and crush the can on my forehead. With the other hand I pull a vial of Lethe water and pour it over Joe Bob’s head. Water from the River Styx, water of forgetting. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I pull the memories of Adrien from Joe Bob’s head. The memories turn into butterflies. The cloud of butterflies flutters on silken wings, then disperses. Joe Bob blinks at me with new eyes. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I open a sungate, give Joe Bob a wink, and step away. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>***<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I step out of the sungate onto the <i>wadi</i>. I’m standing on the edge of a dusty highway, surrounded by thousands of miles of sand, somewhere in the promised land. Israel. I know what I’m looking for is around here somewhere. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>An ancient produce truck rolls up the road towards me. I raise a hand and the farmer pulls over to let me in. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Salaam Alekum,” I say. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Alekum Salam,” he says in Arabic. “Are you also on your way, pilgrim?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I nod. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>"Allah has struck a blow on the terrible Israelis, and given us a new garden of Eden." <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>"Have you seen it?" I ask him in Arabic. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>"I have seen it in my dreams." <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>We drive as Abdul rants about his dream. A land of paradise. As the sun sets, I can see the immigrants as a black mass on the horizon from miles away. Tens of thousands, I guess. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span>It’s beautiful. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>It’s less a forest than a jungle. Thick with fruit trees, orange and pear and banana, all thrown together in a crazy patchwork. The ground is filled with plants from all over the world. The air is like a mist, thick and hot. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Pilgrims have gathered at the edges and were wailing and praying that their prayers had been answered by God. Unfortunately, I know who had answered their prayers. Victoria. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I walk among them, a cynic among believers. It didn’t take long to hear the stories that would become legend and myth. She had walked among them, healing the sick. Blind men saw light for the first time, cripples got up and danced. She had given them a new messiah, became a new religion.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I look out onto her paradise I also see what they could not see. What they did not want to see. I had been witness to the first Garden of Eden. I know what happened, what must happen. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>What must never happen again. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I close my eyes for the last time, and attune myself to the music. Bright and shining off the Van Allen belt, a brass timbre of electromagnetic trumpets. The low keening of infrared waves rising hot off of the cooling earth. Then deeper melodies boil up from within, sweet and silver and blooded from the fires of creation. I listen past the cosmic noise, past the cold sharp waves of causation, brittle shards of spacetime, onto the Worldsong. The Deep Dream. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>The body of Adrien Priest dissolves into dust, then into atoms, subatomic particles and bosons. I have become the light once more, the light that must be darkness in order to quench her. I became one with the carrier wave and let myself be carried away.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>The sun sets on the sixth day. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <span style=""><br /></span> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style="font-weight: bold;">The Seventh Day</span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I meet Victoria for the last time in New York. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I feel her like an ache. She is the precipice. Everything that had stood for thousands of years threatening to fall.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Victoria stands in front of the UN Grand Assembly in Manhattan. Lights reflect hot off her shimmering hair. In her a grey chiffon Gucci suit and serene smile, she is a study of shadows. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“We can end it all now,” she says, her voice unnaturally loud and clear in the ozone-charged air. “Forget the old ways. We can all live together in peace.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“What is it that you propose?” the delegate from Sierra Leone asks, fingers steepled in front of pursed lips, sensing that the compass of power was changing.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I can end all wars, all strife. We can all live in peace.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I slingshot myself around the sun, wavelength flattening at post-relativistic speeds. That which was Adrien Priest is now a distributed intellect cloud of matter-energy cycles a million kilometers wide, a carnivorous dream of pure purpose. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>As I gain momentum, I feed. I suckle on the hero myths of the Bedouin, the revolutionary songs in Havana. A chamber choir in Chicago. An artist’s desire in Tripoli. Lights snapped out on the Eastern seaboard as I draw power. I guzzle cycles from the Internet, psychic power from the combined dreams of humanity of now, past and to be. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I compact myself into a white core of hyperdense matter the size of a grain of rice. I gain speed, flattening myself against time. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">On the floor of the UN grand assembly, the delegate from England stands up. He arranges his glasses, buttons up his jacket. “A wonderful dream, young lady,” he looks<span style=""> </span>down his nose at the new goddess. “We have seen what you have accomplished in Palestine. We are convinced of your power, young woman, but not of your intent. What you’re asking for is unacceptable.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She shakes her head sadly. Grey storms boil in her eyes. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“You misunderstand me. This is not a request.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">The guns of the guards turn to blocks of crystal. The dignitary from Pakistan shrieks as his portable phone has been replaced by a golden beetle. Radios become butterflies. Money becomes dust. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>The ripple spreads out across the world. The rich and the poor are suddenly equal. The blind find themselves able to see. The lame get up and walked. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“It is done,” she says. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>The world has changed forever. Money is worthless. Greed is now futile. The sun shines on a new tomorrow. It barely feel the shadow that hurtles down the gravity well. Prophets sweat and rant in nightmare. Psychics rave and poets cry, feeling what is to come. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>The Earth actually curves slightly towards the my gravitational ripple. I have become a light cone of directed probability at speeds approaching <i>c</i>. I am heralded by a gravity wave like an avalanche, with a virtual mass that dwarfs the Sun.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Victoria. I’m sorry,” I project softly, lovingly, before my thoughts turn to teeth. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>My projectile kernel, now the size of a single human hair, hits the Earth’s atmosphere with such force that it is set aflame. Fires carried across the stratosphere in a ring of destruction. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I plummet through the atmosphere and enter Victoria at one percent beyond <i>c</i>. She boils away in nanoseconds. All that remains of Victoria is a radioactive crater on the UN floor, smoking with a few remaining proteins.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>The shockwave follows, traveling at twice the speed of sound. The UN building ceases to exist. North America and most of Europe are flattened within seconds. The skies are sound and fury, flame and ash. The soil is seared of all life.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Victoria’s physical body is destroyed, but her essense remains. Forsaking a new body, Victoria strikes back with fluid spaceflow. My quantum cloud is shorn in millions of pieces. Each of the shards self-organize and surge at her as a swarm. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>The stars themselves bend and shrink in our battle. The basic rules of the cosmos are rewritten with each clash. Essential math screams. Pi inverts itself. Every straight line becomes bent. The universe screams in pain. It had not felt a battle such as this since the egg of creation cracked. It cannot withstand this onslaught. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Something hears. That which once was Lucifer retained enough of its original viral programming to remember its purpose. It activated its final directive, collapsing once into a zero-point field. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Victoria and I reform on a hilltop in Kfar Saba, overlooking the Victoria’s creation. We stand at the edge of a shantytown that had appeared overnight at the edge of the garden. A rickety shwarma shack made of corrugated tin stands a few yards away. The proprietor smiles with no teeth, as if he sees people appear out of thin air every day. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I have become myself again. I suck in a breath of sweet, sweet air. I look down at my flesh and pinch myself. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Whew,” I say. “I love being meat. I mean me.”<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Victoria looks down at herself, and promptly fells back on her bottom. She chokes a cry. She stares at her hands, scraped with dust and blood, in the shock of being real once more.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Lucifer? What happened?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“You killed me, dear. Don’t worry, I forgive you. Then you tried to remake history. I couldn’t let you do that.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Victoria stood up, regained some of composure. She looked at the clear sky which was not burning. She vaguely remembered the battle that they had fought. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“When are we?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“A few minutes before you are going before the UN council. Before we destroyed this half of the galaxy. Give us a chance to talk before we did it all over again.” <span style=""> </span><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Victoria scowls. “I don’t understand why we’re fighting, Lucifer. I thought we wanted the same thing.”<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I beckon over the hilltop down to the verdant garden that Victoria created. Green vines slither through proud trees. Exotic birds warble. A fertile mist dusts the treetops like cotton candy.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Look at your creation.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“I am looking.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“No, look more closely,” I say. “Look past the beauty.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">I can see her face change with realization. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“It’s dying.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“No insects to pollinate or eat dead vegetation,” I say sadly. “No animals to spread seeds. No water source. Not enough room to host all of the fauna. Within weeks, it will be dead. In a few months, just a pile of mulch.”<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">“Ultimate power doesn’t necessarily mean you can fix everything. I learned that a long, long time ago.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Victoria’s hair is playing in the breeze, and there is a bittersweet smile on her face. She sighs.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“This is why you brought me here.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Actually, Ali here makes the most amazing Shwarma.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Ali smiles and cackles. He slices ground lamb into a metal scoop, and pulls the pita bread directly off the grill. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Spicy?” Ali said in heavily-accented English. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I nod hungrily. Ali piles a perfumed mass of roasted lamb into that pita. With his tongs and an experienced hand he shuffles in pickled carrots, hummus, tomatoes, lettuce. My eyes grow larger as the pita fills. He hands it to me. I bury my face into it, take a bite and let the flavors wash through me. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Bite?” I ask Victoria, holding it out to her. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She folds her arms and turns away from me.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“You’re too big for this world. Humanity has outgrown us. They have become their gods.” I take another bite and wipe hummus off the side of my face. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“But they’re destroying themselves.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I shrug. “They’ll learn.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“What if I can’t wait that long?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I let the question hang there, unanswered, while I chew my shwarma. I’ve already died today defending my world. Hopefully I won’t have to do it again. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><span style="">Victoria looks up at the stars.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Very well,” she says, resigned. “There’s an entire galaxy out there. I will start my own world.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“But you already have,” I say, rummaging in my pocket. I pull out the drop of blood, and the world within that Victoria had created, let it glisten in the sun. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She looks down at her creation.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“First you have to finish what you’ve started. When you’ve made a paradise in here, then come back and talk to me. Maybe you have the answer. I won’t risk my world until you do.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Why am I letting you tell me what to do?” she asks.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Because you know I’m right.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>She nods, and takes my hand. “Come with me,” she says. “We’ll do it right, this time. We’ll have a world for ourselves. Somewhere where you aren’t always on the run from Yahwe and the Radiant Host.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Tempting.” <span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>It would be so nice to live, just live, not to be running and looking over my shoulder. Even with the loss of Gabriel, Uriel and Azrael, the Radiant Host would still be hunting me. But alas, I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I let her hand fall. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I can’t. My place is here. My kids need someone to look out for them. Goodbye, Victoria.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“It’s bad luck to say goodbye, Lucifer. Let’s say something else.” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I say the only thing that’s honest. “I love you.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I love you too,” she says. She touches my face gently, her eyes already lonely.<span style=""> </span>“See you again.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Her body twists and flattens, disintigrates into light, and filters down into the blood marble. <span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>The world is safe again. For a little while. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Ali, I’ll take another.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>*** <span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Years later I find myself sitting at the bar at the Wilshire. I’ve got three empty beerglasses on the mahogany in front of me. I fish into my pocket and pull out the little red marble that I carry around with me whereever I go. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Sometimes I remember what the marble means. I think about Victoria and her perfect world and I wonder if I could ever join her. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Joe Bob sits down at the bar next to me, his stool creaking. He has a black ring around his right eye. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Hey, stranger,” he says. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Hello,” I say, not even looking up. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“What brings you to Knoxville?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Just passing through,” I say the same way I have a thousand times before. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>His eyes find the blood red marble in my hand, and he stares into it. Patterns swirl in the surface. He seems hypnotized. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“What’s that?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“That? Nothing really. Keepsake.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“A lady, eh?” he asks. “I bet there’s a story there.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Very perceptive,” I reply, flipping the marble into my palm and shoving into my pocket. “Get you a beer, stranger?”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“I’ll do you one better. I’ll buy you one if you’ll ride the bull. None of these pansywaists seem to want to ride it, and my doctor tells me I can’t throw out my back again. Seems a shame to let it go to waste.”<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I look over over at the empty ring with the mechanical bull. The smile starts at the corner of my mouth. I nod to the bartender, point to my empty glasses, and motion for another. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>“Sure, why not?” <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><span style=""><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: right;" align="right"><i><span style="font-size:8;">-e2k.8</span></i></p> <p class="MsoNormal"><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></p>erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-50547370676622004882008-12-16T14:52:00.000-08:002008-12-16T14:54:19.339-08:00Liquid Religion<div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-style: italic;font-size:100%;" >Early Wednesday morning on my way to class,<br />a Jesus freak blocks my path<br />wearing a stiff suit, toothpaste breath and toothy leer<br />“Have you found Jesus?” he asks,<br />putting me to the task<br />“Yup,” I say, raising my sacred cup,<br />“Got my religion right here.”</span><br /></div><br />Morning swells and hits like a brick<br />groaning, moaning,<br />full of good intentions, aspirations, inspiration<br />but with little patience.<br />floating in a miasma of drama<br />between life and unlife, asleep and alert, heaven and hell….<br /><br />Oh coffee, sweet coffee, you sing to me<br /><br />Rain and pain falls down crazy from above<br />to mix its tricks with the black subconscious<br />fruits of West and East.<br />Beans and dreams are chewed and brewed<br />deep in the belly of the coffee machine beast<br /><br />Swirls and whorls of milk descend into blackness,<br />darker than taxes. Ivory meets ebony in the ultimate glasnost.<br />Gotta love French roast, Vanilla,<br />iced double cap like liquid smack<br />but it’s legal<br />Hard square sugar ideas<br />dare to lose themselves to that tragic magic<br />disappear clear into my caffeine universe<br /><br />Coffee takes out the crinkled kinks and straightens the cosmic curves<br />letting my pain take brush and stroke,<br />lean mean expresso confessions<br />Raspberry dreams flitting across the iron sky<br />Caged like one-eyed songbirds onto stale paper<br />breathed adrenaline life by my lies,<br />by my jittering pen<br /><br />Cafe au lait. Mocha J. Nonfat, did you say?<br />And a bagel please, with cream cheese<br />take my place in the blackness of the Milky way<br />inject a shot of caffiene wisdom for the coming day<br /><br />-ems98erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-19277170292098269302008-12-16T14:30:00.000-08:002008-12-16T14:45:35.480-08:00Pandora in New YorkJuly <br /> A room seems so much larger without furniture. It is bare, vulnerable, waiting impatiently for the next person to come by and fill it with their life. Rooms need people, I think, they need people the way we need them. <br><br /> The landlady, a frenetic Polish woman in her early fifties, introduced me to the room. She wore an apron and had graying hair tied back but a few absent strands wafted about like cobwebs. A child, blond and large-eyed, clung to the back of her skirt.<br><br /> “This room, she needs another.” the landlady said, motioning with spastic movements. Early morning sunlight tickled the floorboards. The curtains fondled the air. The odors of rosewood oil worked into the floor, jasmine soap in the bathroom, the kettle of sweet porridge in the old woman’s kitchen, they melded together deliciously. Outside the window, Elm and Birch laid their sunset tresses on the dirty pavement of Brooklyn. Children’s voices formed a dissonant chorus of gleeful screaming and chanted games in the preschool across the street. I was already welcome here. It would need a fresh coat of paint on the walls, perhaps some new brass in the kitchen, but the room had bid me welcome. <br><br /> I opened the closet, and a few spiders made a break across the bare wood floor, like a jailbreak. They scattered in all directions, as if to say ‘the new boss is here.’ At the bottom of the closet was a dusty shoebox, taped completely shut. It was very lonely and very still. <br><br /> “There’s something here in the closet...” I said. When I turned around, though, the landlady had disappeared.<br><br /> “Ghosts,” I heard her mutter as she walked back down the hallway, child in tow. <br><br><br /> <br /> I ordered out Chinese that night. The delivery boy was a Down’s kid, all baby fat and smiles and happy eyes. I think he was telling me how delicious my dinner was going to be, but it wasn’t until after he left that I realized he had been speaking English. I’m pretty sure that he couldn’t count, but I gave him a hefty tip. <br><br /> Sipping coffee on the bare floor of my new apartment, I looked at the box. Pandora was once given a box, and look where that got us. Boxes could contain all sorts of things, dreams or ideas. The knife was in my hand before the conscious idea was formed. I tore open the box. <br><br /> Photos. It was filled with photographs. I felt like a thief. I put down the box, turned towards my dinner, and let the moonlight steal glances at the past owner’s memories. <br><br><br /><br />August<br /> Job hunting in Manhattan in a process of accepting your faults and having other people accept them too. Having very few skills, naturally I started from the top. The New York Stock Exchange, the Met, the New York Philharmonic, the Rainbow Room, they were only too happy to accept my resumes. What the hell, I thought, I might get lucky. Fortunately, I hedged my bets with a couple of well-placed applications in coffee shops and restaurants. I survived the abysmal heat by spending my afternoons in the Mills theater, which played old films for two dollars a pop. <br><br /> Coming up the steps of the subway, walking through my new neighborhood, and opening the door to the apartment, each day my world seemed to get a little smaller and a little more friendly. First a desk arrived, where I could put my magazines and stationary, and a bed. Then I picked up some old lamps and posters from thrifty stores, and the apartment started to look like a home. However, aside from a few fantasies involving a young Audrey Hepburn visiting me with a bottle of champagne and a silk negligee, I was the sole proprietor and guest of the apartment. The heat kept me awake until late at night, just lying on my bed sweating, and I wasn’t able to get to sleep until after two or three. <br><br /> I opened my mailbox every day, but it was usually just junk. My first piece of mail came from Peter, star forward of Dell Hills soccer team and my best friend since elementary school. He just started college at the University of Wisconsin, and he wanted to study Psychology. He had an apartment also, and had met a girl, a sophomore in Political Science. I reminded myself to write him. <br><br><br /><br />September<br /> You don’t need to know people in New York. There’s a certain comfort in the fact that everyone hates you and wishes you’d get out of their lives: its like a safety blanket. I never give change to the bum who sits on a cardboard box at the base of my building, but I’d be hurt if he didn’t ask. <br><br /> The stars seemed farther away in New York than they did in Wisconsin. I only had a few hundred dollars left, not enough to see a Broadway show or catch a live band or do any of the things that people that live in Manhattan at night. You can only go on so many walks around Central Park, ride the Staten Island Ferry so many times, stare out on the city from the top of the city from the top of the Empire State so many times, before it all starts to get rather dull. I usually got home around seven, after the bookstore on 81st closed for the night and the old man kicked me out. “This isn’t a library, you know,” he lectured, “You’ve got to buy the books or I can’t make a living!”<br><br /> I had put the box of photos back in the closet, vowing never to look at them, never to violate the implied privacy. Then the pictures in the box started to talk to me. At night, sitting at my desk with an empty sheet of paper addressed to Peter, the pictures were begging me to release them. At first, I didn’t even need to see them to know what they were. They showed Jimmy Hoffa in his watery grave at the bottom of the Hudson. Marilyn, Elvis, JFK and the Lock Ness Monster in a hotel room together, locked into a passionate embrace. They could be lost photographs of an ancient Egyptian temple, discovered in the twenties but made secret again by the Mummy’s curse. Or maybe they were Louis Armstrong as a kid, before his cheeks got puffy, tooting on the old trumpet and wishing that he could see the big lights of the Big Apple from the other end one day. <br><br><br /><br />September<br /> I got a cafe job. I hated working in that goddamn cafe. It was like I was no longer a human being anymore, just a barrier between an irate customer who’s got places to be and things to do, and his perfect cup of half-decaf, nonfat, no preservatives mocha bianca. <br><br />(‘What the hell is a mocha bianca?’ I had asked Charles, the effeminate little shit who worked with me. ‘It’s a mocha,’ he had sneered, light glinting off the ring in his delicate nose ‘except with white chocolate instead of regular chocolate.’)<br />I always had look busy. If I actually looked like I’m enjoying myself, the manager would give me his dirtiest lofty stare. Then he would explain to me how much I should appreciate having this job. Did you know, he would add, that he used to play bass in the philharmonic? <br><br />Something about the people that came there just rang false, the way they moved, the brand names so visible on their outfits, the way smoke curled from their cigarettes so artfully. I took on a foreign accent like the other baristas - it made for better tips, especially when I tried to mix Mediterrean and European - but inside I was laughing at every customer fooled by it. I tilted all the pictures in the café slightly to the left: no one noticed, but it’s my own little private joke on those people who think their lives aren’t a little bit skewed anyway.<br><br /> Charles introduced me to Moon. Moon was a gorgeous doughball, huge and hairy and pale, but with flickering blue eyes like the candle you might set in the window to guide a loved one home. She wore multicolored gypsy mumus and pink lizard earrings. Little food stains covered her dress, tears of neglect. Moon was an artiste, a blind sculptor, who always in line for a show at a gallery but something always fell through. She sat in the cafe for hours on end, never ordering anything, visiting with all her arty friends that wore black and liked to quote Nietzsche and write poetry about death. I guess I was curious about her, about what motivates people like that. <br><br /> One day I ventured back into her private corner, pretending I was doing something official. That’s when I first had a gun put in my face. <br><br /> Three of them were huddled around each other like it was cold, whispering. As I walked past the them, I saw a paper bag and some money exchange hands. One of her flunkies must have noticed the movement of my eyes, because all of a sudden I had a gun pointed into my nose. He was a pale Latino with black eyes like coal and greasy hair, and I knew that he wouldn’t mind shooting me and even getting caught for it. I held my breath and the blood rushed to my head and I couldn’t do anything but stare at the enormous hole pointed between my eyes. <br><br /> People that have nothing to lose are the most dangerous, Dad used to say after he came home from a barfight. But they always fall for the left hook. He would mime a mighty punch in the air, and expect me to believe he had clobbered every trucker, biker and unemployed loser in the joint. <br><br />Moon laughed, exhaling smoke in her oh-too-cool way, and said, “Relax. We’re all friends here, right?” <br><br />“I’ll cut off his cajones if he says anything,” the Latino muttered. <br><br /> I don’t know why I agreed to shoot up with her. <br><br /><br />November<br /> At the first of the month, I got my first paycheck. It was only a few hundred dollars, but being my first paycheck, it was like a nugget of pure gold. I was so proud when I handed the rent money to Mrs. Adrianni. My rent money from my job, not from my savings or my parents. She shrugged her shoulders and took it without ceremony. I was disappointed. Later I went out and bought a whole bunch of groceries at the A & P. <br><br /> After I returned and was standing in front of bags of vegetables, bread, pasta, hamburger, chicken, canned beans and corn that I realized that I had no idea how to cook. Cooking was that strange feminine ritual that Mom or my aunts did behind closed doors, with the clatter of measuring cups and the hiss of the gas stove and the incessant clicking of the egg timer. <br><br /> Thirty minutes later, Chang arrived at my door. He was rolling his head from side to side, smiling, holding a bag of fragrant victuals in his hand. “Is soo good, I tell you.” <br><br /> I understood him this time. “Full of MSG, I bet.”<br><br /> “No MSG.” He shook his head. “No MSG.”<br><br /> “Thanks, Chang.” I gave Chang another healthy tip, and he waddled proudly down the hallway. Intent on eating, I plopped down in my usual spot on the floor, causing dust bunnies to scatter into the corners. <br><br />I decided to clean the apartment a little. I pulled a broom out of the closet to clean up the dust, and accidentally knocked open the box of pictures. Wounded, photographs spilled out like blood. Like a festering boil that needed to be lanced, the box had been opened and the mysteries released. <br><br />The photos were yellowed with age. They must have been at least twenty years old. Fascinated, I lay the broom against the wall and rifled through them. The first was a young girl hidden in that empty closet, except then it was filled with clothes and shoes and teddy bears. The girl was a heroin beauty with midnight hair, moon smile, fire eyes. Several pictures showed her cavorting around the room, playing with a handsome young man who must have been her father. God, I wish anyone would smile at me that way. On the back of the photograph was handwritten ‘Juliana, age 7. Sept 14, 1973’ <br><br /> In high school at Albert Einstein tech, I was surrounded by glasses, training bras, and jumper skirts. All of the girls there knew that they were on the way for Ph.D.s or MBAs in marketing, and didn’t have time for kissy-kissy stuff. Our sister school, Sister Mary’s of Christ, was filled with nubile young future prom queens who they wouldn’t even look twice at me. <br><br />I actually talked to Ricki Goldstein once. I swear her skirt didn’t even cover half of her thighs, and her blond hair was soft and fine as sunflower fuzz. She had just wanted to know if I knew what the capitol of Montana was. I never even looked it up. The whole affair had been so shallow. <br><br /> Juliana pranced through life. The next pictures were at her high school graduation, arms around more beauties like her. I saw her sitting in the driver’s seat of her new car, throwing back her head in laughter, baring her lovely throat and spilling her hair. Her youth burned out of those eyes, into the camera, suffused itself into the pigments of film, and now it burned in me. <br><br /> There were other pictures that I recognized, of the street below. The neighborhood was different back then. The cars were all old Dodges and Fords and Cadilliacs, no imports at all. People wore bell bottoms and polyesters. A shoe store was on the corner, and a French bakery next door. There was a hot dog vendor on the corner, an old black guy with a few white frizzy hairs, and it struck me that the smile frozen below his mustache in the picture that would never grow old. <br /><br><br><br />December<br />“Smack is better than having eyes, darling,” Moon would say, her head rolling around like it had no connection to her body, like a cork floating in the ocean, like a celestial object drifting in space. “It’s like having lips and breasts and vaginas all over your soul. Any thought is an epiphany, any touch is a caress, magical and full of meaning.” <br><br /> Moon showed me how to shoot up, explaining each procedure with the patience of a grade-school teacher. She warmed up the smack on a spoon, and added water. All of her lost artistic talent went into the preparation of that smack. She tied up her arm, injected herself, and let the tourniquet go. I could see her face light up even before the drug hit her: it was the anticipation of the high was better than the high itself. Always things left half in shadow seem more enticing. <br><br /> When the smack rolled up and down my body like velvet sex sledgehammers, exciting and cooling, the world was so much a better place. I’ll take the illusion over the real thing any day.<br><br /> I had been fired from the café, so I spent a lot of time at home. I had nothing better to do, so I kept looking at the box of pictures from time to time. The more I looked through them, the more the pictures started to tell a story. I put them in order of time, like making a movie. As I flipped through them, Juliana’s face became more translucent, from a healthy ivory shine to a ghostlike pale. The flesh faded from her cheeks, her eyes sunk in and became brighter, her shoulders drooped. She was dying right before my very eyes. In the first pictures, she was always in motion, motion frozen in time. As the pictures progressed, she stopped moving, as if invisible threads were shooting up from grandmother Earth and taking hold of her, pulling her down. In almost every picture there was blood, and her hawk-brown eyes. Outside, snow clung to the windows. <br><br /> I wondered if she could age, if she would ever die. Would the curse of immortality be upon her forever, living here in these photographs. On one of the pictures was a name: Juliana Linda Meyer. I looked up in the phone book. Juliana Meyer, 389-3793. Bram Stoker had told me that a vampire never leaves her native soil.<br><br /> The high was fading. I could feel the strains of reality pulling me in all directions at once: my overfull bladder, the rumbling acid of my stomach, leaden cold in my fingers and toes. The chill had crept past the sleeping morphene and taken hold of me. I called her number. The phone rang, and an answering machine picked up. Hot jazz played in the background, then the machine beeped. What should I say? <br><br /> “Juliana, I know you don’t know me, but...I have some old photographs from a place you used to live, 237 East 84th St. number eleven. My name is Jack, and you can call me at--” <br><br /> The answering machine cut me short with a long beep. I looked at the phone and considered calling again, but Chang was knocking on the door, his sweet Chinese accent calling for me, the hot and sour clawing up the door and towards the narrow space between my belt and my ribs. <br><br /> Walking to the door, I reached into my wallet, but it was empty. Chang smiled at me and held out the bag. <br><br /> I showed him my wallet and shrugged. “I don’t have any money, Chang.”<br><br /> He grinned and pressed the bag into my hand. “Eight dollars seventeen cents.”<br><br /> “I don’t have any money,” I repeated.<br><br /> He looked perplexed. “White people always have money.”<br><br /> Hunger gnawed away my conscience. I took the food and slammed the door in his face. He knocked a few times, plaintively, then shuffled away. <br><br><br /> <br />January<br /> I never heard from Juliana. I got a job working nights at a hotel, through a friend of Moon’s. The boss was an asshole but he was usually asleep. I would sit at the front desk and watch greasy guys come in with sleazy chicks that charged by the hour and always went home alone. <br><br />The darkness of the holiday season descended like the slimy gray sky. I imagined at night I could hear people jumping off the Brooklyn bridge, and I wondered how long it’d take me to join them. To defend myself from the monotony I got a stereo from a yard sale, along with a stack of old records. It was then that I discovered classical music. I listened to Haydn and Mozart, letting the music of the ages wash over me, confiding my own insecurities in their timeless brilliance, wondering what they would do in a situation like mine. I stopped cleaning the room. It started to smell pretty bad. <br><br />I wanted to go to Times Square for the New Year’s Eve party, but in the end I decided to stay home and watch it on TV. Who the fuck cares? I fell asleep on my bed, unwashed and unloved. When I woke the next morning, I knew that I had to do something. I was sinking. The pictures were piled up into a corner. I stared at them, trying to draw in their heat, but the heat had drawn into itself and was no longer giving.<br><br />I had to find her. After a short search, I caught Mrs. Adrianni in the hallway. <br /> “Do you know this girl?” I asked, shoving the picture in her face. <br><br /> Mrs. Adrianni turned away, crossed herself. “Ghosts.”<br><br /> “Is she dead?”<br><br /> She turned and walked away, but I continued to pursue her down the hall. She seemed repulsed by the picture.<br><br /> “What do you know about her?” I demanded. <br><br /> She disappeared into her apartment and slammed the door behind her. I pounded on the glass. “Mrs. Adrianni, I have to know!”<br><br /> She reopened the door, and shoved a pile of mail in my hands. “Here. All hers.”<br><br /> I pieced through the mail. Phone bill, credit card bill, electric bill, all in her name. Also there was a letter from Mercy Hospital, but it looked as if someone had already opened it and removed the contents. It was enough of a lead for me. <br /><br><br><br />February<br /> Mercy Hospital was a cold white building against a cold gray sky. I pulled my collar on tighter as I pushed past an old man in a wheelchair to get to the receptionist. <br><br /> “Excuse me. I need to find Juliana Meyer. She’s a patient here. I’m her brother.”<br><br /> “Do you know what she’s in for?” she asked. <br><br /> I had rehearsed this answer ahead of time. “I don’t know. My parents called and said she was here. I haven’t talked to her in a long time.” I hoped the lie was broad enough to cover all contingencies.<br><br /> “Well, let me check…” she typed on the computer, sucking her teeth like she had something stuck in there. “No, we don’t have any patients here under that name.”<br><br /> “Do you have a list of…deceased patients?”<br><br /> Her face softened in sympathy. “No, I’m afraid we don’t. You should probably call your parents to find out what happened.” <br><br /> Juliana is dead. She’s dead and gone. The need knawed from the inside, more insistent, threatening to get out. I slumped over in one of the seats. I bit my lip, the pain felt refreshing compared to the gray emptiness of wanting. I don’t know how long I wandered in and out of the halls. Half-opened doors showed rooms filled with pain. Everything about the hospital seemed evil, out of place. Which one of the rooms had she been in? Did her soul rest peacefully, or did it haunt the halls at night? <br><br /> All of the faces in the white beds were replaced by faces of Peter, Moon, the girls at Albert Einstein, and Juliana. I even saw Chang in there, hands like claws grasping white sheets stained with red. I stumbled outside and collapsed onto a park bench. The need was like gravity, forcing my body to curl inwards. The sky was pushing me down, smothering me, needles of cold wriggling their way through my wet socks and the holes in my jacket. <br><br /> “Hello,” I heard from overhead, soft and raspy, a smoker’s voice, “I hear you have been looking for me.”<br><br /> She stood in the night air, moonlight shrinking just a millimeter away from her body. She wore a white coat. The flesh was dead, but the eyes alive, so alive. <br><br /> I stumbled up to her with the box in hand. <br><br /> “So, you’re Jack,” she said. She touched one of my blond curls carelessly. “You look like an angel.”<br><br /> She was so beautiful. Bloodstains covered her robe. She still had the same midnight hair, moon smile, fire eyes. The winds of time could not wither that pale flesh. She smiled at me like she did in the photographs. <br><br /> “I’m Jack. I have your pictures.”<br><br /> Juliana looked at me up and down with an amused smile. “Are you hiding them somewhere you’re not telling me?”<br><br /> I felt my pockets, and my cheeks burned. “Oh, yeah. I guess I left them at home.” <br><br />“Well, I guess you’ll have to leave another message on my machine. I listen to the messages sometimes. How did you find me, anyway?”<br><br /> “It wasn’t easy.”<br><br /> “Well,” she shrugged, “I really appreciate it.”<br><br /> I was trembling. <br><br /> “What’s wrong with you?”<br><br /> “Oh, nothing.” I locked my muscles to stop them from wiggling, clenched my jaw to keep it from chattering. <br><br /> “I don’t know how to thank you.”<br><br /> I couldn’t help staring at her. A complete stranger, and yet I felt like a knew her. There was something between us, something special. Her eyes glinted invitingly. I leaned in towards her. <br><br /> “Well, thanks again.” And she was gone, leaving me lying on the park bench clutched in the jaws of winter. <br><br><br /><br />March<br /> We met again over Moon’s body. <br><br /> The gas company had turned off the heat in my apartment, so I was spending most of my time at Moon’s. She had a big screen TV with cable, which could keep me entertained for hours, and a entire wall full of LPs. I watched movies, listened to records, fading in and out of a heroin high. People came in and out of the house at all hours.<br><br /> That evening had been pretty dull. I had been sitting on the toilet for almost an hour, trying to take a shit. Heroin constipates you like crazy. I knew freaks who lived solely on french fries, heroin, and laxatives. <br><br /> When I got out of the bathroom, still buckling my belt, the entire room had gone silent. <br><br /> “What?” I asked, irritated at virtually anything when I wasn’t high. <br><br /> Moon was just lying there, like someone had overturned a bowl of milk jello and thrown a few yards of black cloth and glitter on top. I didn't have a clue of what to do. I felt for her pulse, like they do on TV, but I couldn't find one. <br><br /> "Call 911." I said to the tiny black chick that was standing in the corner.<br> <br /> "No fuckin' way, man." She grabbed her bag, and looked at the large bag of heroin on the table. I looked at it too. She grabbed the bag and ran out the door. <br><br /> I called 911. <br><br /> The police stood in the living room while the medics and firemen tried to lift Moon. One of the fireman screamed: I think he got a hernia. I was coming down as they finally got her into the ambulance. I insisted that the ambulance take me to Mercy Hospital. Juliana owed me a favor. <br><br /> As we slammed through the back doors of the hospital, the wheels of Moon’s gurney squeaking under our feet, I called for Juliana. One of the nurses grabbed me and took me aside. <br><br /> “You have to let the doctors do their work.”<br><br /> “I need Juliana Meyer. Juliana Meyer.”<br><br /> “Dr. Meyer works in Pediatrics. This is the emergency room.” <br><br /> “You have to let me speak with Juliana.”<br><br /> The nurse shrugged. “I’ll page her.”<br><br /> The ER doctors had left Moon alone. Either they didn’t care, or there was nothing that they could do. I was dozing off in the chair next to her bed when my bloodstained angel came to visit again.<br><br />“Don’t I know you?” she asked. <br><br /> “Jack. I’m Jack, remember. I have some photographs of yours.”<br><br /> “That’s right, I remember.” <br><br /> “Is…she going to be okay?” I asked, pointing at the enormous expanse of white that was Moon’s comatose body. <br><br /> She flipped up Moon’s eyelids, looked at the monitor, looked at chart. It was so fast I almost missed it. <br><br /> “Yeah, probably. Maybe she’ll come down with an aspiration pneumonia, but she’s lung and she’ll live.” She said with a light, breezy tone. <br><br /> “You make that sound like a good thing.”<br><br /> “Probably would be. She’d be stuck in here so long, she’d come off the habit. Might be the best thing for her. If she walks out unscathed, she’ll be back soon enough, and then she’ll be dead. So, can I see my photos?”<br><br /> Strange bird, that one. Don’t ask me how, but we ended up at my apartment. We laughed and laughed. I don’t know who kissed who first, or who started taking clothes off first. I don’t exactly remember the next three weeks. <br><br /> She lives at the hospital. She goes into a dark cave every night, and works with blood. Every day she comes home with bloodstains. I think she’s drinking it. She needs that blood to live, to maintain her beauty, like the photographs. <br><br /> She came to my apartment often, to watch TV or eat or make love. She used to live there when she was in medical school. <br><br /> “How did you get into medical school?” I asked, lying on the bed, hands running over her naked body. <br><br /> “I fucked every guy on the admissions committee,” she said, and for a second I believed her. I can never tell if she’s putting me on, her molasses slow sweet smile betraying nothing. She exhaled from the cigarette. The smoke blew upwards, crecendoing to the ceiling. <br><br />“So, what do you want to be when you grow up?,” she asked. <br><br /> Silence. I decided I needed to say something ambitious, something intelligent. <br><br /> “A filmmaker, I guess.” <br><br /> “Oh, yeah? What kind of films do you want to make?”<br><br /> “Real ones. Ones about the way life is, not what we want life to be. Taxes, soured marriages, premature ejaculation, back pain, that kind of stuff. Things that remind us what it’s like to be human.”<br><br /> She grabbed my chin to look straight into my eyes, her nails bit into my flesh. “How old are you, Jack?”<br><br /> I thought about jerking my head away but her hands were strong and I knew they’d take flesh with them. Instead I threw it back at her. “How old are you?” <br><br /> She shoved me away. “Never ask that to a lady.”<br><br /> “You aren’t a lady,” I said, shoving her back. <br><br /> Juliana turned away, so that her face fell into shadow. “I think being human is overrated.” <br><br /> When she looked up at me, I felt my spine clench. “When I first saw you, I thought you were an angel.” she hid her face behind her hair. “With your golden curls and that cute round boyish face. I thought you had come to save me.”<br><br /> “Save you from what?” I asked. <br><br /><br><br />April<br /> Juliana came to my apartment after a long shift. She smiled at me, I kissed her on the cheek, then tucked her under the covers. She was still asleep when I came back from the record store, so I turned on Bethoveen and let him work his magic. <br><br /> When Mrs. Adrianni saw Juliana she crossed herself and mutters. <br><br /> “The old lady never liked me. She thinks I’m a ghost.”<br><br /> I was silent. The back of my mind was like a screen, playing visions of bloodstained coat, the light in her eyes. <br><br /> I never said it, but in my mind I was thinking it. I doubted. <br />Are you a ghost? Are you real? <br><br />She saw it and turned away from me.<br> <br /> “Jerk,” she said. She stood completely still. Her eyes were dry, but tears were falling from her voice. “You know, when I was a kid I was really sick. I mean, really sick. I had leukemia.” <br><br /> “You don’t fucking know a thing until you’ve spent an entire night alone, pain crawling up your body so you can’t even think, counting the seconds passing by, hoping the morphene will overcome you and take you to sleep.”<br><br /> She got up to leave. <br><br /> “Don’t you want your pictures?” I said. <br><br /> “Keep them.”<br><br /><br><br />May<br />I tried calling her for a week, paging her, but she never returned my phone calls.<br />I got a job as a production assistant on a shoot. Most of the time I was running for sandwiches, film or gaffing tape, I got to see how things really happened. After a week of total awe, I started to see the kinks in the armor. Moviemakers hid within the magic of imagination, letting our minds do the work for them. We all want to lose ourselves in the illusion so much, they don’t have to work so hard. After three weeks I was convinced I could do the job better than they could. I did some gigs as an extra, saved up for my SAG card, and spent most of my time and trying to talk to the second AD.<br /><br><br><br />June<br />The next time I called her, she picked up the phone and was very sweet. I asked her about her work. <br><br /> “What ever happened to the guy in those photographs?”<br><br /> “I asked you never to talk about that.” she said.<br><br /> “I have to know,” <br><br /> “He was a patient of mine, all right. A patient. He was in the hospital when I was just a candy striper. After a while, we got…close. I loved him, I think. Then he died.”<br><br /> “I’m sorry.”<br><br /> “You should be.” Silence. “His will paid for medical school. He was better to me than my parents ever were.” <br><br /> “He put you in his will?” I asked, laughing. Juliana had a way of joking that didn’t sound like a joke. <br><br /> “He loved me,” She said, with large red eyes. “And I loved him. I tried. He died, but I am the ghost. I’m afraid of getting too close to the world of real people. I only feel comfortable around the dying. They don’t expect forever.”<br><br /> “I didn’t ask for forever.”<br><br /> “Thanks. I’ll think about it.”<br><br /><br><br /> I tried to get myself clean. I went cold turkey for a couple of days. It was easier to ignore the need in the heat. I picked up some tricks to keep my mind off shooting. Chain smoking, for one. Dreaming about the future helped, too. For once, I saw myself going somewhere. <br><br /> I kept talking to the second AD, trying to move myself up the ladder. He saw the look in my eyes, and he hooked me up. He saw me going places also. <br><br><br /> <br />July<br /> I’d been broke for weeks, and the pain was screaming out my eyeballs. Moon would be in the back corner of the café right now, waiting with my fix. Like a thief, she could steal my pain and desire. But not for free. Never for free. <br><br /> Even though I was standing on my feet, I crawled into the hospital holding the box in my hand. I found her in the break room, flipping through a stack of papers, a half-eaten sandwich next to her. She looked up at me, and her eyes went wide. <br><br /> “Twenty-five bucks.” I heard myself say, holding the box out in front of me. <br><br /> “What? Jack, are you okay?”<br><br />I hated her pity. The need screamed at her.<br><br />“Twenty-five bucks. For the pictures.” <br><br />As my mouth moved, my mind was already begging for forgiveness. An eternity passed in that instant, and everything about her changed. Her forehead wrinkled, her shoulders stiffened. <br><br /> “Okay.” she said, wrinkling her nose. <br><br /> “Fifty.”<br><br /> “Okay,” she said flatly. “Fifty, and no more.”<br><br /> “Just fifty dollars. Just business.”<br><br /> “You goddamn junkie. At least now you fucking understand pain.” Her tone softened somewhat. I looked at her, and finally I saw Juliana, not some ghost or image of a former life. We finally understood each other.<br><br /> She pulled out her wallet and littered bills into the air. Peter and Dell Hills and the University of Wisconsin were so far away. As Jackson and and Grants and Lilcolns fell in slow motion to the ivory tiles, and it was as if I was listening to Bach again, the last strains of the organ breaking in the distance. <br /><br><br><br />-ems99erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-66287579404263299132008-12-16T12:46:00.000-08:002008-12-16T13:46:36.068-08:00Mismatched SocksI remember my wedding as a bright and fluid thing. Like watching a waterfall in the sunlight, trying to watch the individual drops falling. It was a collage of guests, parties, presents, and expectations. I was twenty-three. That was thirty years ago. <br><br /> I was lucky, for marriage was a game of chance in Korea in the 1960s, before the West started to exert powerful forces of cultural change on Asia. I had met my husband three times before marrying him. My husband was a good man, a kind and powerful man, funny and loving and childish and irritating all at the same time. I loved him like one loves the tides - always present, but sometimes in and sometimes out. As much as any couple could be, we were happy. <br><br /> Like all Korean men, after working late he would drinking with his friends. They would go to clubs and bars and soju tents on the street, drinking beer and makoli and soju, singing and vomiting and being idiots until the early morning. Like all Korean women, I would chain lock the door so he would have to beg me to let him in the house. Sometimes I let him in because he was a demon in bed. Sometimes I didn’t, and he had to sleep on the doormat until the sunrise. <br><br /> Sometimes he didn’t come home at all. There are places where the dancing girls would do more than dance, and they all knew him by name. He flirted with the coffee shop girls and I know he had a few mistresses, but he was smart enough not to get caught. <br><br /> Together my husband and I had four strong children, one son: Yoonjoong, and three daughters: Sunah, Mia and Jinah. We would all lay in bed on Sunday mornings, watching TV and eating tasty kyul, arguing and joking and laughing. Sometimes he would lift up his leg and let out a vicious fart, point to my son and say “That one’s for you!”<br><br /> He worked hard to be the ideal husband, to provide for the children and I. His hair was always combed and his collar straight. He owned several businesses, and was even mayor of our town. Back then nothing happened without bribes, and he got a piece of every one. Men would come to our house sweating in new suits. They would bring birthday cake boxes filled with money, my husband would nod, and the deal was done. He was powerful and important. He knew it and I loved it. <br><br /> As he got older he drank a little less and stayed home a little more, where I could get my claws into him. We fought constantly about little things - I think that sometimes the fighting substituted for our diminished drive to make love - but in the end, we had the ties that bind. <br><br /> The ending was inevitable. It came in the form of stomach cancer, from too much drinking and long hours of work. He tried to fight the sickness, kept going back to the hospital, took special Chinese medicines and ate special foods, but he just got weaker and weaker. Finally he quit work and just stayed at home with me and the children, and for a few quiet months we stayed together like a family should. We didn’t argue anymore, just joked and smiled and remembered. <br><br /> It came the middle of the night. We were talking together, when he told me that the pain had disappeared. The children were sleeping nearby. We remembered the good times and laughed about the bad times. We talked about the children, and their future. I cried. He wiped away my tears. I held his hand and prayed. He said goodbye, and closed his eyes. <br><br /> That was four years ago. He was fifty-three when he died, far too young. We visit his grave four times a year, offering meat, fruits and soju alcohol to his spirit, and then have a picnic with what remains, because when spirits eat the food does not disappear. <br><br /> His ghost still stays with me, coming home late at night and hanging his coat on the rack, sitting in the chair in front of the television, or reading his silly martial arts novels. He doesn’t speak as much as he did when he was alive, but his comforting presence remains. <br /><br><br><br />II. <br><br /> The time has come, and my oldest daughter was getting married. My son Yoonjoong is already married and has a child, but that’s not the same feeling as having one’s daughter get married. That combination of happiness and sorrow is hard to describe. My little Sunah was going to be leaving my home. She wasn’t going to be my baby anymore, she was going to be a strange man’s wife. <br><br /> Sometimes I call her my favorite, but sometimes I don’t. Sunah is the black sheep of the family; beautiful and intelligent, but strong-willed and arrogant, just like her father. She is certainly the most unusual of my children, and the one most destined for happiness and sorrow, for great deeds and pain. <br><br /> Sunah is smart, a little too smart. She got a degree from one of the best universities in Korea, understands computers and speaks three languages, but she lacks common sense. Mia and I are always trying to keep her out of the kitchen, because whenever she starts cooking it’s a nightmare. Not that the food is bad, but she works like a whirlwind for hours and dirties every dish in the house. Everything about her is magic and wonder - reality has little bearing on her life. <br><br /> She had told us all that she wouldn’t be married until she was thirty-nine. Not forty, but thirty-nine. I tried to tell her that life doesn’t always work that way, but of course, she had to learn on her own. <br><br /> <br><br />III. <br><br /> My two oldest daughters lived with me in Seoul. Jinah was still attending the University in Taejon, staying with her aunt. <br><br /> My son Yoonjoong often came to visit, bringing my grandchild Sunoo. He was five years old, a spinning sugar-cube of creative destructive energy, bent on knowledge and conquest of his growing world. His fat little face was filled with wonder and sarcasm. At five he was already a comic. He was like Sunah, just a little bit too smart for his own good.<br><br /> I spent my days cooking and cleaning or going out with my friends. We went out shopping, to the hair salon, or get drunk on soju and go out for karaoke in the middle of the afternoon. My nights were for my family. Together, they were the light and liveliness in my world of crumbling traditions. <br><br><br /><br />IV. <br><br /> It was one week ago that Mia asked me innocently “What if Sunah wanted to marry a man with long hair, an earring, and wore socks that didn’t match?”<br><br /> I said “Absolutely not!”. <br><br /> I love my daughter, and I respect her independent streak, but there are certain things that are not acceptable. Korea’s history is over five thousand years old, and tradition is one of the strongest binding forces in our society. <br /><br> Little did I know that Sunah already had such a man in mind. I guess that I too had to learn on my own. Love is the bullet. You can’t run or dodge or defend. <br /> <br>They met on the bus. I still laugh to myself when I hear this. They were stting next to each other and just struck up a conversation. That’s my Sunah. That was only three months ago. <br><br /> I’ve heard quite a bit about this young man. He was young, only twenty-five; three years Sunah’s junior. For starters, he was mi-gook-saram, an American. He had long hair, and he did wear an earring. He was extremely tall, almost two meters. My Sunah must have felt like a child next to him! <br><br /> He worked as an English teacher in Seoul. Does he want to teach English the rest of his life? I asked her. Being a teacher was a very respected position in Korean society. She shook her head. <br><br>"He’s going to school to be a doctor, Mother, but I think he wants to be a writer." <br><br /> He was a kind boy. He called her almost every day. He wrote her poems (in English, of course.) and sang to her. At least he sang better then she did.<br><br /> I saw pictures of them together, when they went to Chunchon for the weekend. The photos of them together were little tears of time. I would probably look at these pictures in ten years and smile. Together, they were laughing and playing. They looked very happy. <br><br /> Still, long hair? An earring? I couldn’t help but be concerned. <br><br><br /><br />V.<br><br /> I think that I coped with the issue very well. The first thing I did was to get very, very drunk. I had three bottles of wine that night, and I don’t remember what I did. The next morning, I regretted my decision to drown my sorrows in alcohol, but what else could I do?<br><br /> I visited the fortune teller, in his little box near the subway. He was a smiling little man with three rotting teeth and soju from last night still on his breath. He sat on a stool, surrounded by his magical texts, calligraphy pens and seals. We chatted and drank tea while he consulted ancient astrological books. <br><br /> I couldn’t contain my nerves while the fortune teller hummed to himself. Even the most important weddings had been cancelled because of a bad match. No one wants bad luck. I wondered if my Sunah would be too proud to call off the wedding. What would I do? <br><br /> The fortune teller clapped his hands together once with a boozy grin. Sunah and her fiance had Kung-hap; a lucky match. I was delighted.<br><br /> My next task was to break the news to my family and friends, in the most subtle way possible. I called my brother-in-laws. I tried to be as subtle as I could, to gauge their reactions. I said something like “what if your daughter wanted to marry a foreigner?”<br><br /> One said, “Why not?” The other said, “Why would she do such a thing to me?” <br><br /> Next, I talked to my best friend. I knew that she would give me a straight answer, good or bad. She told me that she had two daughters married to Americans. Both of them lived in the United States now, and both were very happy. That made me feel a little better.<br><br /> Then I asked her, “Do your sons-in-law have long hair, or earrings?<br><br /> “Of course not,” she said with a rising tone, as if offended by the question, “They are both very nice boys, with good jobs and good families.” <br><br /><br><br />VI. <br><br /> We were going to meet him that Saturday. I was so nervous about meeting this boy that would take my daughter away from me. He didn’t speak more then a few words of Korean. I wouldn’t even be able to talk to him. Sunah, whose English is almost perfect, said that she would translate for me. Still it would be uncomfortable. <br><br /> The house was a mess. That was my first, most immediate concern. This boy that wanted to marry my daughter may be an angel or a criminal, but he wouldn’t find my house dirty. It was time to clean the place up. We had been talking about putting on a fresh coat of paint for years. Why not make it an event? Men in dirty coveralls came and tore up the house, pulling the furniture away from the walls, putting down speckled dropcloths, pulling off the old wallpaper, sanding the old paint smooth. Every night that week we went out to dinner because we couldn’t cook in the kitchen. Sunah and Mia both complained about the noise and confusion, but in secret, they were delighted with the imagined results. <br><br /> My husband, no longer affected by the currents of the physical world, seemed to ignore chaos that ruled the house. He came home at the usual time every day and sat in his favorite chair. The television had been moved, so he just read his martial arts novels. I never understood why he liked those books. <br><br /> The men worked like mice in a cage, always moving and shouting at one another. I stayed close by, directing their every move, like a master conductor. My house had to be perfect, and I wasn’t going to rely on them to do it themselves. <br><br /> In the end, it turned out wonderfully, the walls as white and smooth as a new baby. Then the cleaning begun. The clothes were tossed out of sight, the shelves arranged. Brooms and vacuums groaned like angry soldiers attacking dirt. I went into a frenzy, burying all of my anxiety and excitement into the task.<br><br><br /><br />VII.<br><br /> Yoonjung came over Friday night, the night before the event, bringing my little Sunoo with him. As I was in the kitchen talking on the phone, I overhead Sunoo talking to Sunah. Sunah mussed his hair and picked him up, carrying him around the room. <br><br /> Sunoo said, “I’m going to teach Eric how to speak Korean. If he says one, I’m going to say hana. If he says two, I’m going to say duge”. <br><br /> Sunoo was going to be in for a surprise. This would be the first time he’s ever met a foreigner. It would be the first time for me, as well. Oh, sure, I’ve taken group tours to other countries and seen foreigners, but this would be the first time that I really met someone who had not lived their entire life in Korea. <br><br /> All I really know about Americans is what I see on television, in the movies, or what I hear from others. They seem terrifying, loud, obnoxious, violent. I had a sudden image of my daughter, a delicate vision of loveliness dressed all in flowing white, standing in front of the altar with Arnold Schwartenegger, wearing torn jeans and a naked chest, his muscles oiled and bulging, a machine gun resting on his shoulder. <br><br /> I was a little worried. <br><br><br /><br />VIII. <br><br /> Saturday morning, I woke early. I had a mission. I did my hair and decided to wear a red blouse with a black dress. Sunah told me that he likes red. <br><br /> The kitchen was busy at nine o’clock, and would stay that way until his arrival at six. Meat was diced and browned, vegetables prepared, soups stewed. Mia and I chatted while we cooked, watched TV, drank tea, and had a great time. Friends came and went, brining little wrapped gifts and nervous smiles. I forgot entirely about the purpose of our efforts, until the clock chimed five. <br><br /> He would be here soon. <br><br><br /><br />IX. <br><br /> The doorbell rang innocently at ten after six, and I heard Sunah’s voice floating through the door. They were here. I was very nervous. I straightened my outfit, patted down my hair, and opened the door. <br><br /> I looked up and up and up at him. Eric was very tall, with pale skin, round eyes and an enormous long nose like the head of a trout. He wore a nice shirt and slacks, but his hair was tied back into a ponytail, and I could see a small gold stud in his left ear. I found out later that Sunah had given it to him. He was a little clumsy taking off his shoes. <br><br /> I couldn’t believe it. His socks really didn’t match. I thought that she was joking about that. One was black and the other was white. They were thin and threadbare, the white one had a tiny hole near the big toe. I tried not to stare at them. <br><br /> Eric greeted me with, “Anyong-hasayo,” like that was the only Korean word that he knew. I said “Hello,” with my hands clasped together to keep them from shaking. <br><br /> “#%*&%)*(&,” he said in English. I smiled and pretended to understand. We both were smiling like idiots, desperately trying to make a good impression.<br><br /> “Would you like something to drink?” I asked him. Sunah translated. He said he wanted coffee. I prepared him a cup, and sat down across from him. The room vibrated with tension. I asked him a few innocent questions, about his family and the like. After a few minutes, we started to relax. In person, he didn’t look so...foreign. He was just like me, nervous and uncomfortable, trying desperately to please. <br><br /> I told Sunah, “I feel a lot better now that I’ve met him.”<br><br /> Eric smiled when he heard the translation, and replied in English. I understood the meaning without knowing the words. “Me, too,” he had said. <br><br /> He called me Omonie, mother, as if testing it on for size. I smiled and nodded my approval. <br><br /> <br><br><br />X.<br><br /> Sunoo sat in his chair and refused to greet the stranger. He was sullen, all limp and mean-looking, staring at the television without looking up. <br><br /> Sunah diagnosed the problem immediately. Sunoo was jealous. Sunah was his favorite aunt, his playmate and friend. She would wrestle with him like a man would and take him to the park and the zoo. She talked to him as an equal, not as a child. Now, this huge foreign man was taking her away from him. I felt pangs of empathy. I knew exactly how he felt. <br><br /> We tried to cheer and cajole him, but nothing would work. Even when dinner was called, he just sat at the edge of living room, staring at the floor. <br><br><br /><br />XI. <br><br /> The dinner was a grand feast that had taken hours to prepare. It was worthy of a king. The entire set of tables were covered with small white dishes of kim-chee, salads, vegetables, fruit, meats, noodles, and rice. Sunah had told me many stories of Eric’s legendary appetite. <br><br /> I picked up the chopsticks and tried to show him how to hold them. He picked up his own chopsticks with perfect form and plucked up a piece of meat to demonstrate. <br><br /> I poked Mia in the ribs, “He uses chopsticks better then Sunah.”<br><br /> Sunah sat down next to Eric and started explaining the food to him, in English. He smiled in that way that said, I know. He listened to her with half an ear while eating like a voracious squirrel, picking at little bits of food at a constant rate which didn’t slow for thirty minutes. <br><br /> All was going well, but I looked at my watch covertly. Where is Jinah? I worried. She was supposed to be here an hour ago. Is her train late? Is she afraid to meet Eric? <br><br /> No, that didn’t sound like her. Maybe it just didn’t seem like such a special event for her. I could hear her voice clearly in the back of my mind. “Mother, people get married to foreigners all the time these days. It’s not like Korea is the only country on Earth.”<br><br /> I turned my head when I heard Sunah laughing, almost spewing out a face full of food. Eric puffed up and raised his eyebrows, gesturing grandly with his chopsticks. Mia saw the way that they were joking around and said. “He is just like Sunah.” Sunah translated her comment to English, and Eric smiled. Then Mia added with a devilish grin. “That’s not supposed to be a complement.”<br><br /> At that moment, Sunoo walked up to Eric, and without a word, stroked the hair on his arm. Koreans have a mixed fascination with body hair. Sunoo just wanted to know what it would feel like. <br><br /> After dinner, Sunah took me aside. <br><br /> “So?” she asked, her face filled with nervous expectation. <br><br /> I could see how much this meant to her. I looked out at Eric, who was still eating and was trading mangled Korean phrases with Sunoo. He was so strange, alien, and yet he had that special quality of...specialness...that my Sunah had. “He seems nice,” I said. <br><br /> She jumped up and hugged me. <br><br><br /><br />XII. <br><br /> Mia and I cleaned up the dishes, while Eric and Sunah went upstairs to her room. Minutes later, Sunoo clomped up the stairs to join them. After a few minutes, Sunoo dissolved into peals of laughter. I could hear Sunah’s laughter, Eric’s low rumbling chuckle. The roughhousing, laughing and thumping went on for an hour. <br><br /> Finally, Sunoo’s mother called him down. He said he didn’t want to come down. Eventually he did, but he kept looking for excuses to go back up to the loft. <br><br /> “I left my socks up there.” he finally managed. <br><br /> He went back up, and the laughter and thumping started once more. His mother shrugged helplessly. They are all children, I thought, let them play. Then, Sunoo squealed, in feigned fright. I heard him say, “Show me again,” then Sunoo squealed even louder. <br><br /> His mother called up, “Come down, Sunoo!”<br><br /> Sunoo thumped down the stairs in that clumsy, five-year-old way, vibrating with excitement. “What was all that noise about?” his mother asked. <br><br /> “Mom, I’ve got a secret for you.” Sunoo said in his loudest whisper. “The man is covered all over with monkey hair!”<br><br /><br><br />XIII.<br><br /> That Sunday I went shopping for some special gifts. When I arrived, Eric and Sunah were sitting on the floor, watching a video. His head was in her lap, and she was stroking his long hair. Her other hand was holding his, their fingers twisted together. They acted exactly like I expected young lovers to act - always wanting to touch and stroke and kiss each other, always wanting to be together. Their heads were probably filled with wide hopes of tomorrows, of joys and laughter and bewonderment.<br><br /> My baby was leaving me. Despite it’s aching newness, the thought no longer scared me. I was excited for my daughter. She deserved to be in love. She was that special kind of person that is allowed to have a special kind of love, like the kind in stories and movies. From what she told me, they kiss all the time, even in public places. They were the kind of couple that walks in the rain, holding hands, unaware of the raindrops falling from the sky. <br><br /> My baby was not a baby anymore. She was a woman, and she loved a man, and they would move halfway across the world from me to start their new life. <br><br /> I opened my bag, and dropped ten pairs of brand new socks on his lap. They would live and learn and grow together, through hardship and pain, love and joy. He probably would not cut his hair, or take out his earring. But at least he would wear matched socks.<br><br /> My husband, sitting in his favorite chair watching the television, long dead but still not completely aware of it, nodded his approval.erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-47196464683986071722007-06-14T05:59:00.000-07:002007-06-14T06:05:18.815-07:00Anatomy of a dreamWeek One: <br /><br /> I was stripping off layers of my brain when the dream returned to me. <br />I held a brain in my latex-gloved hands. My brain wasn’t covered with blood or gore like I’d imagined it would. It smelled like vinegar, having been picked in formalyn for several weeks after being removed from an undeserving skull. It looked like a Play-doh model of a dinosaur shaped by the pudgy hands and borderless imagination of a three year old. It was gray and lumpy, about the size and weight of a honeydew melon. <br /><br />I had stripped off the grey cortex of the insula, the island between the temporal and parietal lobes, with a broken popsicle stick. Underneath were the nerve fiber tracts of the internal capsule, which looked like white, damp hemp. These tracts ascended to become the corona radiata, connecting the cortex and subcortical structures. Heaven and earth. Telephones lines between man and God. <br /><br />Seventy white-coated figures surrounded me, all bent over brains similar to mine. We were in the basement of the medical building, trapped in a room with no windows, lit only by dead florescent lights. The silence of the tomb was broken only by the murmuring of tutoring describing brain structures and the clink of scalpels dropping on steel tables. <br /><br />It was our first week at the Sackler School of Medicine in Tel Aviv University. We had toiled thousands of hours in eight a.m. physics lectures, foul-smelling chemistry labs and midnight reviews for the MCAT in order to be here. We had made our pilgrimage to the land of the Living Bible to become student-doctors.<br /><br />It seemed as if the lights dimmed, or moved far away, as my mind drifted back to the dream. The world was empty, quiet and dark. A shape appeared against the backdrop of darkness, a shape of arms and legs and an inhuman head. A bird-man. He was tall, broad in the shoulders, and covered head to toe in robes. He had a long beak like an ibis and enormous cloth eyes. In his hand he carried a staff of wood, thick as a baby’s wrist. <br /><br />He looked familiar, as if I had seen him somewhere before. <br /><br />Thus Spake Zarathrustra surged in the background. The powerful concert piece started with three trumpet calls, each ascending higher than the last. <br /><br />The bird-man raised his staff. The dark world quieted, as if awaiting him to speak. Wisdom radiated from him like an invisible sun. He opened his mouth to enlighten me and his first words were--<br /><br />“BEEP-BEEP-BEEP!”<br /><br />The alarm clock had cut him off. Whatever wisdom that he had was denied by eight am Neuroanatomy. I had struggled to awaken, as I now struggled to come back to reality. <br /><br />“Aren’t you going to identify the arms of the internal capsule?”<br /><br />Josephina, my lab partner, stood with her hands on her hips looking impatiently at me. Her high-pitched voice brought me back to the lab, back in the world of white and chrome, Greek and Latin, brains and scalpels. <br /><br />***<br /> <br />Preparing for a career in medicine was a process of neurosurgery. At the University of California at Berkeley, close enough to hear the hum of the cyclotron and the discontented murmurs from the homeless, I learned to slice midsaggitally down my brain. Parts of the tumor called identity were resected, quivering bits of individuality that were discarded in the bin marked BIOHAZARD - BODY PARTS ONLY. Facts were sewn in. The wound was closed with catgut of childhood dreams, of smiling doctors in white coats and nubile nurses and perfect patients. <br /><br />We were premeds: brilliant, determined, ideological. We were the best of the best, who wanted to save the world, to heal in others what we could not heal in ourselves. Premeds. A word synonymous with competitive, ruthless and anal retentive. We knew that only one out of three of us would be accepted to medical school. We were competing with the sharpest minds in the best Universities. We were competing with each other. <br /><br />Like our Cell Physiology professor said “If it can’t be measured, it doesn’t exist.”<br />Medical school applications are quantified at every level: MCAT scores, grade point averages, and extracurricular activities, measured in hours per week. They even have a score for brown-nosing measured by letters of recommendation. You become a number, which is measured against the numbers of your peers. The biggest wins. Size does matter. <br /><br />The lucky few were priviledged to display themselves in front of admissions committees. Making a central slice down the skull, I pulled away layers of bone, dura, arachnoid, and pia mater, to reveal the gleaming pathology inside me. It is a process of exposing yourself aggressively, even violently, like flashing old ladies on the street wearing only tennis shoes and a trenchcoat. <br /><br />My scars were approved. I was accepted. <br /><br />But the biopsy proved that the cancer had spread dangerously. The operating room was ready. Bit by bit, my diseased identity would be cut out. Shiny, perfect facts would be put in its place. <br /><br />Medical school would begin. <br /><br />Week Three<br /> <br />We began sectioning the brain in vertical slices to see the structures underneath. In one slice we saw the amygdala, the almond that gives us the ability to fear, and the head of the caudate nucleus, which lets us move without flailing our bodies like disco dancers. The next slice showed us the hippocampus, named after a seahorse, which allows us to store memories, to realize the significance of each moment and know that it was different than the last. Slice: the thalamus, the gateway of the senses. Slice: the corpus collosum, connecting the two hemispheres of creativity and precision. <br /><br />I knew intellectually that this was a human brain, supposedly the seat of consciousness and the soul, but it was hard to reconcile those lofty ideas with the corpulent structure in front of me. The slices looked like olive loaf or hog’s head cheese, neatly arranged on the side of the tray as if in the butcher’s display window. It was hard to be sentimental about something that looked like lunchmeat. I felt like Frankenstein. <br /><br />The Chef walked over to examine my work. The Chef was a portly Russian lab assistant who wore a white paper chef’s hat. He didn’t speak much English, but he knew his brains well. According to rumor the Chef had been a famous neurosurgeon in Russia, but had fallen to a lowly anatomy lab technician after immigrating because of his lack of facility with Hebrew. <br /><br />“Visual signal in one eye, cross over…contralateral side…” he explained in heavily-accented English. <br /><br />“Through the optic chiasm, right?,” I said. <br /><br />“Good! Good! Yofi!,” the Chef replied enthusiastically while pointing with a scalpel. I tried to be appreciative of his complements while dodging the brain-stained blade. <br /><br />The Chef turned back to his brain, “Look here now, optic tracts…” <br /><br />With the Chef’s guidance, that mundane lump of neural tissue took on magical life once again. Time faded away and space narrowed into a tiny tract of land no bigger than a football, but with all the landmarks and pitfalls of darkest Africa, as we continued our cortical safari. We followed the optic tracts into the back of the thalamus known as the lateral geniculate bodies, into six layers of processing, then through the optic radiation into Meyer’s loop which lead us into the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe and later to other association areas... <br /><br />Hours passed. I smudged some brain off of my notebook and yawned. Any subject, no matter how fascinating, loses it’s brillance after two or three hours of intense study. We’d been in class for a total of seven hours that day. Ground brain congealed on my stick. Little bits of brain were spattered here and there. I rubbed my temples. The gyri and sulci were starting to swim around like waves in the ocean. My own brain hurt. I could feel the synaptic connections being severed and resewn, as the experience was starting to mold me. <br /><br />***<br /><br />The sun was exploding fire into the Mediterranean sea as I left the Sackler building. The fire spread across the sky, leaving behind the blue newness of dusk. Palm trees swayed in ocean breezes, exotic treeliths warbled, woodpeckers pecked. I took a deep breath, trying to expel the toxins from my lungs. It was a strange transition from the fluorescent lights and fomalyn smell of the Neuroanatomy lab to the beauty of Tel Aviv in late autumn. <br /><br />Natural beauty was only a part of the scenery. Brice, a brash Canadian that looked more like a hockey player than a medical student, called Israel ‘the land of milk and honeys.’ The white sand beaches beaches and grassy parks were thronged with slim, tanned and scantily-clad Israeli women. Vending machines outside the supermarket rented raunchy porn videos. The sidewalk cafes were lined with hip youngsters in black like Paris or Milan, drinking their espressos and talking politics. The only difference here was that along with cello cases or notebooks, the young Israelis carried M16s and special forces berets. <br /><br />When I first considered medical school in Israel my main concern was safety. Every time I turned on CNN in the U.S. it seemed there was another terrorist bombing in Israel. The reality is that Israel was perhaps safer than most major U.S. cities. My wife felt comfortable walking alone downtown in the middle of the night. My biggest worry was crazy Israeli drivers. <br /><br />Week Five<br /><br />I had my first hospital shift that week, with a smiling British endocrinologist I nicknamed the Surfing Rabbi. Dr. Niven’s fat fingers dropped the insulin pen several times while demonstrating its use, but he knew how it worked. He was gentle with his patients and seemed to care about his work. I admired him and wanted to be like him. <br />He took us on a tour around the hospital. He showed us the tiny babies in the nursery, no bigger than puppies, grimacing and thrashing their way into life. He showed us the Emergency room, where sluggish patients roamed around waiting to have stitches taken out or children’s fevers checked. Then we encountered our first real patient. <br /><br />She had sixty-seven years of life in her. She had survived Jewish pogroms, two husbands, had bore three children and eight grandchildren. Now she was as helpless as a child. The oxygen mask helped her to breathe, medications kept her heart rhythm stable, but no one could talk to her. She only spoke Russian. <br /><br />I felt as helpless and frightened as she. I knew techniques for stabilizing trauma, for bandaging wounds and massaging dying hearts back to life, but I had nothing to ease her pain. I couldn’t even speak Russian. The only thing I could do was to sit next to her and hold her hand. <br /><br />We are made of blood and spit, shit and piss. Illness can drain a person of everything they recognize about themselves. In the hospital, technicians poke at them with needles, nurses order them around as if they were children, and even their own bodies rebel against them like petulant children. The first treatment the patient needs is not medicine or surgery, but rather dignity and humanity. To realize that grey lump of jello is not jello but is somehow something more. <br /><br />The bird-man had come to me that night, except that his face was the old lady’s face. Instead of speaking, it sang a lamenting song. <br /><br />“All that was immortal, inspired, innocent and fresh, <br />is now chained to Earth by cracked bones and torn flesh. <br />swollen with agony, gouted with spite. <br />rocked by the thundering of each heartbeat, <br />pierced and splintered by each ray of light. <br />I am no neurochemical engine simple and clean; <br />no jellied goo of cells and molecules, impulses and streams. <br />I am the gaunt spirit in the haunted house; <br />The doomed ghost in the mortal machine.” <br /><br />I tried to get the song out of my mind but I couldn’t. I kept seeing her face. Her face, with the bird-man’s body. <br /><br />I was back in lab, staring at the brain again. I rolled it over and over in my hand, identifying various lobules. Instead of looking at tiny sections of brain, I wanted to get the big picture. Holding up the brain, it didn’t seem like much on the outside. The frontal lobe, the seat of higher intellect. The parietal, the sensual lobe that coordinates cognition with experience, occipital lobe, the movie screen in the back of your head which makes sense of electrical signals that come from your eyes. cerebellum, pons, midbrain, medulla. <br /><br />Was this the sum total of a human being that had lived and died? Was his or her personality still somehow trapped within? Did he or she die young of severe leukemia, or perhaps much later in life of a broken heart?<br /><br />I started to learn Russian.<br /><br />Week Seven<br /><br />Phrenology was a branch of neuroscience quackery from the nineteenth century. Phrenologists believed the brain pushed out on the skull, and therefore careful examination of the skull could determine a person’s personality. For example, if you had two little bumps on top of your skull like horns, they thought you were possessed by evil. <br /><br />Now we know it’s the other way around, that the skull pushes in on the brain to make the lumps and folds that are unique to each person. Like life. Freud said we only grow by frustration. When we reach the walls of our little reality, we sort of conform to fit them, but each of us comforms in our own way.<br /><br />Medical school is the skull that crams us all in together under high pressure, and we learn our personalities in relation to each other. Like learning the names of esoteric structures that are all different and yet somehow alike, I have to learn the names and personalities of my fellow students. We were crammed into a very short space, constantly bumping elbows in the classroom, the library, the lab. We soon learned our relationships to each other. <br /><br />George was the class clown. He has a deep voice sort of like a radio jockey, and he wanted to go into the Air Force. Then there was Julia, blond and long of limb, who could easily pass for a Nordic stewardess. Julia liked learning languages. ‘And I like steak,’ she would say. ‘I could eat a steak for breakfast and another for lunch’. <br /><br />Some of us were even farther out. Byron has a Ph.D. in jellyfish studies. Janice had been a graphic designer. Wallace had been a professional dominator, complete with whips, leather and female submissives. Hell, I used to be a Taoist priest. <br />It wasn’t as strange as it sounds. Doctors are really a fanatical monastic order ordained by the AMA. Who else but monks or medical students would give up the best decade of their lives working ten to eighteen hours a day, forsaking food, sleep, even sex? Why was I memorizing irrelevant structures on the inside of the brain that ninety-nine percent of humanity had no knowledge or interest? I started to wonder what the hell I was doing there. <br /><br />Finals Week:<br /><br />Dr. Gantrow, a thin severe man with a Germanic adherence to punctuality, stood way at the front of the room. After he finished chewing us out for coming to class late, eating, he began his lecture on the cranial nerves. He was staring to drone like the adults in the Charlie Brown cartoons. “the ninth cranial nerve, the glossopharangeal, exits from the medial side of the medullary olives….wah, wha-wah-wah-wah,…”<br /><br />Gantrow leaned a little bit from the weight of his own self-importance. Even his phrases took a little time in each breath to reflect on their own wisdom. Meanwhile I was trapped on four sides by the damn little blue plastic seat that was putting a nasty kink in my back. My head was lolled forward and my eyes half-closed, but I couldn’t concentrate and I couldn’t sleep.<br /><br />I wondered what the students at Harvard were doing at that moment. If Sackler was flying economy, Harvard was first class. They had just returned from lunch at the gentlemen’s club, and were happily digesting in leather recliners. A stewardess floated from row to row with complementary drinks. <br /><br />“I’ll have a bloody Mary,” a student would exclaim with a girlish giggle. The whole class would laugh politely. “How droll!”<br /><br />I let my eyes unfocus and daydream about what I’d be doing if I wasn’t in medical school. Perhaps I’d be a writer: living in a sleazy dive in Istanbul, banging away on the never-finished novel on my portable computer, rubbing noses with British expats in white tweed, smoking hashish in coffee shops with walls stained brown from smoke. Maybe I’d special agent of the FBI, poring over computer files of suspected terrorists, coordinating with local sheriffs to find terrified kidnap victims in Kentucky, or hunting down tax evaders. I still have my FBI application on a shelf somewhere, but they’d never let me in because I smoked pot more than the maximum 15 times allowed. They even use a polygraph to make sure you don’t lie about it. <br />I wasn’t like the others. My parents weren’t doctors. I wasn’t a particularly good scientist, nor was I interested in golf or country clubs. I never wanted to own a BMW. Why was I here? What had I done to deserve this torture? <br /><br />The daydream wandered of its own volition through time and space. In preschool, hoarding the Tonka trucks and Legos in our special corner of the playroom, we asked each other what we wanted to be when we grew up. Fireman, policeman, doctor, or lawyer? I wanted to be a Luke Skywalker. I wanted to be a hero. This was the last of my thoughts as my eyes closed, my head lolled to the side, and the world became dark. <br />My world was empty and quiet once again. The bird man stepped out of the shadows. His staff clacked against the ground as he approached me. As he drew closer, I realized where I had seen him before. It was in an old book on the history of medicine. The costume was worn by English physicians during outbreaks of plague. They kept sweet-smelling herbs in their long beak, which they believed protected them from the foul demons of disease. <br /><br />The bird man opened up his skull and removed his brain. He tucked the top of his skull in the crook of his arm, and held the brain out before me. His voice was soft but seemed to fill the world. <br /><br />“Sometimes an event has a history and a personality all to its own. It is decisions and consequences, it is past wounds and future possibilities.”<br /><br />Sitting under the metallic white light, bathing in formalin breezes that had filtered through artificial chambers down into the basement, I remember that moment and I let it free. I let it free, and I set myself free.<br /><br />I was six years old, riding up the tow robe, with skiers on all sides. I was so excited! Skiing was going to be fun, skiing was going to be so great! Then I felt my leg twist, as it caught on another girl’s skiis. I will always remember her face, cherubic and blank, as if she knew she were nothing more than an agent of destiny. My leg was pulled backwards, while my frozen fingers were locked on the icy steel tow cable. The pain and terror was bewildering. I was so scared I started to cry, as the sky and ground whirled. Confusion, confusion, pain and fear. <br /><br />Then they came. They wore red and blue parkas, smiling faces, they took me and they ended the confusion. Put my leg in a cast, told me everything was going to be okay. They brought order from chaos, security from fear. They were my heroes. <br /><br />The experience had made its mark. From then on, perhaps not openly but in my secret heart, I knew I must become like them. Talismans of health and healing. <br />In the dark of night, when the innocent have fallen asleep in their beds, you will find me in the libraries and in the laboratory, in the secret rites of preparation with the old masters ready to pass on their cowls. I will become the masked man in the white coat who arrives from nowhere to rescue humanity from insanity. Those who have no voice but the hiss of the respirator, the peaks of an EEG, they will find voice in me. I will be the cry for help finally answered. <br /><br />I will become a doctor. <br /><br /> ***<br /><br />It was the night before the big neuroanatomy final, and my mind was churning. I laid in bed unable to sleep, tossing back and forth in anxiety. The facts and figures, structures and functions, lumps and folds, they all whirled in my mind without pausing to try to make sense. I was speaking in tongues to myself. <br /><br />In the darkness I was flying, like in astral travel, wind whipping through my hair and nothing under my feet and I felt fantastic and free. I didn’t see the bird man anywhere, but I wasn’t concerned. I turned over and over again, soared through the free black air, without boundaries or inhibitions. <br /><br />Far away I saw a planet. <br /><br />As I got closer, I saw that it was an enormous ghostly skull. Through the bone, I saw the surface of an enormous brain spewing out of the spinal cord like a great grey ocean in slow-motion photography. It boiled upwards inch by inch until it splashed against the white cliffs of the skull. As it pressed inward, lumps and valleys were formed. <br /><br />As I swooped down towards its surface, the skull faded away to leave the brain exposed. Flashing across the hills and valleys like a bird over treetops, I saw images. Memories of my life, playing like disembodied TV sets…shouting To Ho Ka Mi Eh Mi Ta Me at the top of my lungs, swinging a blue-painted iron bell filled with steel bearings louder than God, together with fifteen other white-clad priests, feeling my legs on fire but praying the Universe would speak to me…getting propositioned by a soft skinned hard edged Japanese hooker in a crowded bar on the seventh floor of a thin building like a bacon strip reaching for the Kyoto skyline…riding with the head paramedic Linda in the back of the ambulance bumping over rocks at seventy miles an hour with a kid on the stretcher who looked like he was made of white sticks who said he drunk eighty beers, shouting at Linda “you stupid bitch you whore you fucking whore let me go,” so she slammed an NT tube into the kid’s nose and he screamed and taped an oxygen mask to his face so that he couldn’t shout at her anymore flying over the handlebars of my beloved Yamaha at forty miles an hour in the rain with the pavement rolling like a grindstone under me and not being scared but thinking ‘oh, shit’…getting the acceptance letter from Sackler and screaming to myself ‘I finally did it I finally got into medical school’… <br /><br />I saw an unformed section of brain: medical school. Flat and featureless, but fertile with potential. A host of experiences waiting to be molded. To mold me. Let the tests come, I thought with a rush of freedom. Let the long nights and ungrateful patients and big loans and bad coffee come. <br /><br />I am ready.<br /><br />-e2kerscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-65880311405686777222007-06-03T16:44:00.000-07:002007-06-03T16:47:20.143-07:00The Master PlanThe Master Plan<br /><br />I came to Stony Brook last June with a secret master plan. The plan was to kill my career in medicine. And the plan is almost complete. <br /><br />That’s right. I hated medicine so much that I wanted to quit, but my debt wouldn’t let me go peacefully. I took a job so that I could use to pay off my loans and then be off to the next horizon. It wouldn’t be the first time. I’ve been a writer, a teacher and priest. Who knows what’s next? <br /><br />Stony Brook was to be the tombstone of my medical career. After laying the last seven years of the bleak ugliness of modern medicine to their final rest, I could move on to next adventure. <br /><br />Then I met you. The residents of Stony Brook. <br /><br />You showed me grace under pressure. John’s easy laugh, Kyle’s indefatiguable enthusiam, Manny’s soft-spoken poise. <br /><br />You showed me how to be a doctor. Jeremy soothing a crying child with pictures of his dog. Darryl’s care inspiring complete loyalty in his patients. Elizabeth’s inability to swear or be discouraged. <br /><br />I tried to teach you what I had learned. I have tried to give you everything I had, but I received so much more. I looked forward to coming to work. I created new lectures and new lesson plans in order to make experience better. <br /><br />The secret master plan is scrapped. The new plan is no secret. I plan to become the best doctor and teacher that I can. <br /><br />I hate to have to leave you now, but you know I have my reasons. <br />I’ve leaving a different man from the one you met a year ago. I came to Stony Brook beaten and bruised from medical training. You restored my faith in medicine, in teaching, in doing good despite the system. <br /><br />Emergency medicine is about giving people second chances. You’ve given me my second chance. I promise I won’t let you down. <br /> <br />Thank you, Stony Brook class of 2007. <br /><br />Eric Schultz<br />Honorary 4th year resident<br /><br />P.S. You’d better visit me, bitches. I know where you live.erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-33385374441849133532007-05-21T07:25:00.000-07:002007-05-21T07:27:15.535-07:00Lost GenerationWe are a brother and sisterhood of lunatics<br />truck drivers and whores, cops and taxi drivers, drunks and strippers, Wawa clerks, ambulance jockeys, writers and insomniacs <br />Living 90 degrees perpendicular to you<br /><br />Howling our lives on the lampdark streets<br />Chasing the wolf moon<br />Bleeding in the emergency room<br />drinking in bars and alleys<br />begging for change <br />shooting ambrosia of heroin or sex or sadness<br />riding up our skirts for a thrill or a tip or a ride<br />roaming the broken bones of the city still sooty from your footprints<br />biting back sarcasm of your shallow sunbright delusions<br />of your MacDonalds and Starbucks and Mommie Me<br />bulging silicone and sagging Botox<br /><br />We are your reflection<br />In the mirror of dusk<br />We see the rays of the sun only reflected<br />Off the wolf moon<br />Or tracking across the dawn concrete <br />On our way home<br /><br />When consciousness is a drug<br />And being awake feels like being drugged<br />Sleep is a privilege<br />The dark nectar of sanctuary from the darkness of life<br />90 degrees perpendicular to yours<br /><br /><br />e2k.4<br />status post night shift at Temple<br />Mugshots coffee shop<br />Philadelphia, 2004erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7021883134662663859.post-52121986785864471472007-04-21T06:54:00.001-07:002007-04-21T06:54:49.818-07:00Different eyes<p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">I: Ghosts, 2:03 am<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I was standing alone, at midnight, in a room filled with ghosts. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Talking. In complete silence. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">The fluorescents cast a pale white light around everything, a light that is meant to reveal but instead obscures. That kind of light can't even pierce a sheet of paper. The ghosts are lying on steel tables, placed in neat rows. Their blue and gray insides are exposed, leaving their secrets bared. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">All of the world I grew up with, the world of the known, the world of the accountants and Sunday football games and television and pro wrestling, they have all gone to bed. They lay with their delusions while I confronted reality. While they laid with their dreams, I interrogated ghosts.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">II: Elegant Machine<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">"You have to understand, the bodies are just like cars." Dr. Taitz had said in lecture that morning. "After the driver steps out of a car, only the machine and the chassis are left. There are no drivers here, just the cars. Just the machines are left." This was our first and only introduction to working with dead bodies in medical school. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Dr. Taitz was standing in front of the the Anatomy Lab, a white and chrome room in the basement of the Sackler School of Medicine, where we would be spending the better part of the next year of our lives. We were arranged in rows of seats in the auditorium, immobile, waiting for wisdom to be showered on us. Just outside the auditorium seats, a solemn brigade of cadavers surrounded us. Each was outlined by a harsh overhead light, covered by a sheet, and again by a transparent plastic shell that kept the smell from escaping. Like the boogie man under the bed, they waited silently, and perhaps we believed if we didn't turn to face them they would disappear. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Dr. Taitz was a sports physician from South Africa. He was squat and fit, and gave an impression of density, in incredible shape for 76 years old. He had treated the casualties from wars going back to 1967. Taitz's job was to teach us about the upper limb, the arms and shoulder girdle. From the surface it seemed fairly simple but we learned quickly that appearances could be deceiving. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Taitz believed that functionality was its own aesthetic. He saw the body as an elegant mechanism for work and play, and wanted to impress his beliefs upon us. He used a Buddhist method of teaching. Taitz was trying to let us reach for a higher level of understanding. "Don't learn it, just know it," was one of his least-liked phrases. Many thought he was mocking us. He wasn't. He was trying to show us the way of satori, true enlightenment, through Anatomy.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">"Notice the elegance of the tendons going through the carpal tunnel." He said, holding his own wrist, as if we could use X-ray eyes to pierce through his skin. He pronounced all his A's as hard A's. "Really amazing, isn't it? The tendinous sheath keeps the tendons tight into the wrist. However, it can rub against the median nerve and cause carpal tunnel syndrome, like you chaps that are copying down every word I'm saying."<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">Thousands of years of superstition wrapped each of the cadavers. Taboos about cutting dead bodies, causing the dead to rise from their sleep. Ghosts, ghouls, vampires, evil spirits. The Jewish tradition was to bury a body within twenty-four hours. Just by their very presence, the cadavers represented an affront to the religious among us. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">Forget all of that, Taitz told us. They are just objects. They are just cars with the drivers missing. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">Philosophically, Anatomy was rooted in strict materialism. Everything can be explained by some physical principle. Biology is just a concentration of chemistry which is really just a concentration of kinetic physics, which is nothing more than engineering. Doctors will happily explain your every thought and emotion by the preferential binding of one chemical to another due to microscopic electrical forces. No longer is the body a magical, impenetrable organ, now it becomes a complex machine to be understood in terms of kinetics and mechanics.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">I wondered if they are just cars with the drivers missing. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">III: Mediums, 3:03 am<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">The ghosts didn't have names. They had tags like 58(. They were white bodies on steel tables. Their individuality had been swallowed by death, but they were special people who had donated their bodies to the cause of science in a land that believed the body was sacred and inviolate. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">They were perfect and untouched except two cuts in the lower abdomen, near the genitalita, with white cloths sticking out. I never found out what happened there. My gloves were wet with cadaver juice. It bubbled and squished underneath my fingers.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">The interrogation had begun. They say dead men tell no tales. They never understood pathology. I was the medium who read their stories. Nothing in their lives would be safe from me. I could feel their stress in the hardening of their arteries. I could see the years of smoking in the blackening of lungs. 16 D had cancerous nodules in the lymph nodes of the neck. 45A had stiffening and shrinking of the kidneys. My own cadaver, 58E, had tiny clots in the vessels of his brain. I knew how he lived and how he died. My interrogation was precise, perfect, irrefutable. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">58E. I tried to name him, but it seemed somehow inappropriate. His eyes stared blue and sightless. He had a big bulbous nose, with brown-grey nose hair. His mouth was blue and dry, lying open like stuck in the middle of a snore. A cloth covered his head, concealing the empty skull. His brain had been harvested for neuroanatomy long ago.<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">He didn't really look happy, sad, or lonely. He was beyond such emotions now.<span style=""> </span>My Sensei said once that the face we are born with comes from our parents, but as we get older that face becomes all our own. Reflecting our personality. Through life, he had made his own face. In death, I would read it and try to find some truth. <span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">IV: Known and Named <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>We learned about head and neck from Professor Rak. Rak was a warrior-priest for the cause of evolution, the knight for mighty Darwin himself. In the land of the living Bible, he preached the way of science. He had a set of skulls in his office, lined up exactly as evolution had molded them, from Austrolopithicus to Habilis to Sapiens after a short two million years. Those fetishes were part of his magic.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">Rak was enormous. He was a huge man, solid as his namesake, and when he talked his arms would make enormous sweeps through the air. He was enormously intelligent, articulate, and thorough. He would make chalk drawings of key features of the skull. Here was the petrous bone, the rockiest part of the body. He was the architect of the thyroid cartiledge, which forms the Adam's Apple the cricoid cartilegdes, and the arytenoid cartiledges, putting them together so that they formed the larynx. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>"It's even more complicated than that," was his favorite expression. For Rak, the kingdom of the skull was the seat for something greater. Anatomy was about control. Rak learned things and controlled them. I wrote down what he said, and then I to could control that knowledge. Even if I didn't remember a particular fact, I know that it's safe in my notebook somewhere, or in a textbook, or on a computer. It's controlled. Managable. Rational. Sorcerers and alchemists believed that every spirit in nature had it's own secret name, and that by having that name, you could have power over that spirit. Over the elements, over time and space. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">One organism. Two arms. Two legs. A thorax and abdomen. A head. A penis, or a vagina. Sixty percent water, forty percent organic tissue. 216 bones, X arteries, X veins, X named organs composed of X types of tissue. A hundred billion neurons, ten billion hepatocytes, a trillion lymphocytes, ten trillion red blood cells, Total about 75 trillion cells. 220,000,000,000,000,000 base pairs of DNA. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">Over a thousand names to be learned, mostly in Greek or Latin. Almost a million details to be memorized and put into context. There were over four hundred points on the human skull alone. Known and named. I knew them all. Did that give me power over men's minds? <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">Magic is an ability to grasp the ungraspable, to have power over the elements and the spirits, the unknown. Scientific knowledge is in itself a kind of magic, a sorcerous power that physicians wield in order to perform their acts of healing. How would we use that power? <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">V: Details, 4:50 am<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">I raised from the dead (next to the dead, that is) and stretched my aching bones. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">I got a Coke and a Schnitzel sandwich from the vending machine, a glowing black box in the dark grey corridor. That was dinner. Or maybe breakfast. The more time we spent on other's bodies, the more our own bodies were neglected. Fat people got fatter. Skinny people lost weight. We all lost our Tel Aviv summer tans, and were gaining bright white flourescent skins. Our skins looked like bones, as if the insides were starting to come out.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">I shuffled back into the lab, sat down next to my textbook, and stuffed the sandwich into my mouth. Whatever taste it had was blocked out by the words on the page.<span style=""> </span>I turned the page of my textbook, but the words blurred and twisted on the page. Moore's Clinical Anatomy stood on top of a pile of books next to my lab table.<span style=""> </span>Underneath it were several notebooks, the Washington Manual of Medical Therapeutics, photocopied lecture notes, Essentials of Orthopedics, pens and flashcards, and my portable computer. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">We had been studying at the University of Tel Aviv for four months. Medical school had reached the ultimate level, finals week. While the summer sun faded, and clouds of winter erupted from the desert sky, we learned. For the past seventeen weeks we had been going to classes six to eight hours a day, to follow up with two to four hours of private study every evening. The sun had flown on golden wings across the sky while our pens scratched and pages turned. Now six exams that would gauge how well we had absorbed that information. They would be packed into fifteen hours over seventeen days. The moon would sail across the sea of night while we prepared. For every hour of lecture and studying and review, we would have less than a minute to show what we had learned. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">The trick to taking medical school exams is not to know the material or know it well, but it to know it such that it could be recited in your sleep. My own technique was to read the book and listen to lecture, and make a manuscript of notes that was an omnibus all the material for that subject. Then I would recopy that manuscript, by hand, over and over again so I could copy it without looking at the original. I copied my notes onto flashcards and spiral bound notebooks. I copied into the margins of books and notes. I copied in the library, in the Histology lab, in the coffee shop, in the mall, at my desk, in my bed. I copied while watching TV, listening to music. I copied in my sleep. The scrawl of my pen was like the relentless machinery of the human body, flawlessly copying millions of base pairs of DNA every second. Every detail would be remembered, a thousand times over, because every detail might some day mean a life.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">I looked down at my notes:<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">Two phalanges, proximal and distal, articulated by a saddle joint. Attachment for a total of seven muscles. Connects to the trapezium of the wrist by a condyloid joint. Powered by the Thenar emminence: Abductor pollicus brevis, Flexor pollicus, and Opponens pollicus, which allow the joint to be abducted or adducted, flexed or extended, and opposed. Ennervated by the recurrent nerve, a branch of the median nerve from the lateral cord of the brachial plexus, from cervical spinal roots 5-7. Blood supply from the superficial branch of the radial artery. Skin sensation from the cutaneous branch of the median nerve... <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>All this for the thumb. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>This little structure allowed humanity to use tools, to step off the ladder of Darwin's evolution and make its own rules. I had never believed the thumb could be so complicated. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">Life exists in the details. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">VI: Death<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">In Egypt getting your own corpse means hiring a graverobber. In some places you buy a cadaver, some places you beg borrow or steal. In Taitz's South Africa, with only two major medical schools and hundreds of people dying every day, you get a fresh cadaver for every class. People don't appreciate how lucky they are to have someone's body to study from. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>There were several Orthodox Jews among our class. To them it was of the utmost importance that the bodies were not Jewish. In the Jewish tradition it is important the body be buried within 24 hours of death. I didn't understand all of the sentimentality surrounding a dead body. I had already arranged to donate my organs to science when I died. It was a tool when it was alive, and now it's a tool when it's dead. Like soil. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">I have heard some wild stories about medical students and their cadavers. Apparently one guy put the cadaver in the passenger's seat of his car, and used the extra body to drive in the car pool lane. The time-honored trick of putting a live person on a cadaver table had been repeated every year. Either flaunt your reaction or rebel from it, but you can't deny that the reaction is there. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">Understanding the pathology of death, the microscopic details that shift so that the well of life no longer heaves, is not the same as accepting the end of your own existence. It is something we never truly face. Either you obscure it with religion and superstition, or you rationalize it with scientific positivism. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">We all came to terms with death on the anatomy table. It had ceased to be abstract. Death would ride with us, forever. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">VI: Different Eyes, 5:45 am<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>My eyes were burning from formaldehyde. I walked out of the Anatomy lab into the spring night. The glowing dial on my watch read 5:45 am. The bag on my back hurt from its weight. It was like carrying a bruise.<span style=""> </span>It seemed like it took a week to walk to my apartment. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>Walking up the stairs, I saw an old lady with her dog. She greeted me with a sweet smile and a 'Shalom'. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><span style=""> </span>I didn't know her name, or anything about her. She always smiles and says Shalom to me. I knew nothing about her, but with my eyes I can look deep inside her. I can see the muscles moving over bone, under skin. I can see right down to the most molecular level, the DNA unwinding and transcribing RNA that will make proteins that make life. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">I have come on a pilgrimage to this faraway place, this cradle of the Western world, because I had eyes but I could not see. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">The masses only allow themselves to see the surface of things, without significance, without consequences. They will take out stock in a high-paying fund that supplies money for weapons-brokers that sell arms to Iraq. For them a hamburger is meat on a bun, not ground flesh of lipids and peptides filled with bacteria, toxins and multicellular parasites. A sweating homeless man is an annoying inconvenience, not an alcoholic with thiamine deficiency and kidney failure producing renal frost. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">Physicians see the reality of death, people at their worst, the lowest of the amplitude in the rhythm of life. As student-physicians, we will be exposed to the heights and depths of the human condition. As scientists, we see the causes and results of each folly of life. Innocence is forever barred from us. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">Like the microscope, I will see the most basic building blocks of life. I will penetrate the undefined arche split open, classified and quantified. Like the madman, I will break through that invisible veil that separates the artificial wholeness of the world to the pulsing pathogenic masses inside. Like the scalpel, I will slice open a curtain of carefully-studied ignorance and live in a world of practical realities which allow for no vanity or delusion. <o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">Somehow you expect me to once again be a part of the mass of humanity, to close these eyes pried open with knowledge. But that feat is impossible. I will be forever set apart as the gatekeeper of sickness and health, life and death, as the one who sees with different eyes.<o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style=""><!--[if !supportEmptyParas]--> <!--[endif]--><o:p></o:p></span></p> <p class="MsoPlainText"><span style="">-e2k<span style=""> </span><o:p></o:p></span></p>erscutmonkeyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09560987733367310091noreply@blogger.com0