Anatomy of a Dream finally published

Anatomy of a Dream is now available for download on Smashwords, free for a limited time

...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...

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/249685

RELIGION

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.

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.

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.

I do not suffer death in my presence.

Randy, sweaty and bald in scrubs that hung in all the wrong ways, held a finger over the orange SHOCK button.

“Everyone clear? All clear?,” I said, my voice certain and monotonous from thousand resuscitations. “Shock.”

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.

“Still in V-fib. Charge again,” I said.

“Charging,” Randy replied. The LifePak 12 whined.

“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.

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.

“It’s your Code, Big Guy,” he said, with a thick Eastern European accent and Gallic shrug. He knew it was my thing.

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.

“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.

“She’s back,” I said. Her eyes were closed, and the oxygen mask steamed with each breath.

“Pressure is 180/120, doctor,” Randy says, swinging his stethoscope around his neck dog-collar style.

“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.”

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.

“Listen, big guy, you did a great job. I just talked with her family. She’s a DNR.”

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.

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.

“Elaine! Elaine, can you hear me?!” I shouted.

No response. She coughed.

“Elaine, we just restarted your heart. I want to put you on life support. Do you want us to do that?”

She coughed. Her mouth seemed to be moving, but I couldn't hear what she was saying. I leaned in closer.

“Are you a religious man?” she whispered from frothy, cracked lips.

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.

“Are you a religious man, doctor?” she asked again, and either from her lungs or my conscience I heard her.

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.

I can hear the clanging of bells in the distance. Ten arms falling as one, ten iron bells clanging. Chanting.

***

To Ho Ka Mi Eh Mi Ta Me.

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 gi pants. Sennin Kai. I am chanting.

This is my first Misogi.

To Ho Ka Mi Eh Mi Ta Me. To Ho Ka Mi Eh Mi Ta Me.

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.

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.

The chant becomes faster.

Toho Kami Ehmi Tame! Toho Kami Ehmi! Tame!

***

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.

“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?”

Malek shrugged.

“Right. Randy, give me a half-mig of Atropine and grab the pads.”

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.

“100 milliamps, rate of 60.”

Another line of green.

“No capture.”

Malek looked sad. Not sad for the patient. Sad for me.

“Big guy, she’s got cancer. She’s only got a few months anyway.”

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.

***

Toho! Kami! Ehmi! Tame! Toho! Kami! Ehmi! Tame!

This is my second Misogi, that we do every year. I have become an instructor, the youngest instructor in his dojo. Twenty years old.

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.

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.

Toho Kami Ehmi Tame!

***

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.

“No capture, doctor,” Randy said.

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.

Most days, I could handle it. Let it go, bitch to my friends, drink, laugh and forget.

Not today.

“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.

“No capture.”

Fuck this.

“Randy, push two amps of bicarb. I’m going transvenous.”

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.

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.

***

TOHOKAMI! EMHITAME!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

TOHOKAMI! EHMITAME!

***

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.

I stopped, and stood straight. Closed my eyes, calmed my breath.

I could hear Randy’s voice quaver. “Doctor?”

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.

“Doctor?”

I slid the electrode through. Slowly. With infinite calm.

“Capture!” Randy said.

“Give me sixty at sixty, Randy. Sixty at sixty.”

A powerful pulse thundered through her body. It hammered against my finger on her wrist. Her color returned. She sucked on the oxygen mask.

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.

“We’ve lost it. No capture,” Randy said.

“Okay, I’m tubing her,” I replied automatically. It was a lifesaving procedure, I was good at it, I could save her.

Malek sighed. I looked up at him, and the fever broke.

“It’s not what we want, Big Guy,” he said. “It’s what she wants, remember that. It’s what she wants.”

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.

“Do you a religious man?” Elaine asked me, in a voice that could not have been hers.

“Yes, Elaine. Yes, I am.” I said.

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.

“Time of death, 11:55 pm.”

A collective breath was let out. The drama was over.

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.

“Do you answer to God?” her corpse asked, with motionless lips and empty lungs.

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.

Endings

Madame Ellie Mae Williams Davis began a tiny little poem

Six pounds three ounces of song

Eyes of shallow waters

And pale simpering flesh

All others fell in her father’s eyes

At seventeen her stanzas broke hearts

Brought grown men to weep

Stopped Studebakers on Main Street

She drained malteds and Cherry Coke

And dreamed of a watercolor tomorrow

At twenty three she combined with another work

Two verses together

Forming a couplet

From them sprung little inspirations

At ninety two she is slender and willowy and white

She pants with tongue dry and cracked

Back arching into me

Spongy lungs engorged

She no longer leans towards tomorrow

She falls back to the past

I watch her climax in front of me

She screams like a baby

“No no no no” horrible “no”

While she recapturing her youth

I will violate her death

I open her gates

Insert the tube to feed her breath

I pierce her with needles and pipes

When her poem ends

Endings are the most difficult part of any work

A return to the dominant chord

As the last echoes of her melody fade away

I write

“Time of death, 3:15 am”

-e2k.7

Different Eyes

I: Ghosts, 2:03 am

I was standing alone in a room filled with ghosts.

Talking. In complete silence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

II: Elegant Machine

“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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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.

I had never cut a human body. I wasn’t sure if I could.

Forget all of that, Taitz told us. They are just objects. They are just cars with the drivers missing.

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.

“Okay, now, make your first incision,” Taitz said.

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.

III: Mediums, 3:03 am

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.

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.

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.

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.

He didn’t really look happy, sad, or lonely. He was beyond such emotions now. 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.

IV: Known and Named

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 Austrolopithicus to Habilis to Sapiens after a short two million years. Those fetishes were part of his magic.

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 cartilage, which forms the Adam’s Apple the cricoid cartilages, and the arytenoid cartilages, putting them together so that they formed the larynx.

“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.

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.

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?

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.

V: Details, 4:50 am

I raised from the dead (next to the dead, that is) and stretched my aching bones.

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.

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. Moore’s Clinical Anatomy 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.

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.

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.

I looked down at my notes:

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…

All this for the thumb.

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.

Life exists in the details.

VI: Death

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.

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.

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.

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.

VI: Different Eyes, 5:45 am

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.

Walking up the stairs, I saw an old lady with her dog. She greeted me with a sweet smile and a ‘Shalom’.

I didn’t know her name, or anything about her. She always smiled and said Shalom 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

-e2k

One percent

It’s Saturday night in San Francisco. 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!”

“Sorry if I bothered you there,” he apologizes.

“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. 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.

[[Illyana, had a great time. You are beautiful and charming, and I hope to meet with you again.]]

The tea has an aftertaste of ash. The sky is wet iron, rusted yellow from the reflected lights of San Francisco. Rain patters the concrete, nips at the hem of my bluejeans.

“Listen, sir, perhaps you can help me out,” he says. “My name is Roland Chase. I’m from Burbank. I was driving up the coast when I was carjacked. They took my wallet, man.”

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.

There is power in details.

Before I moved to San Francisco, I was a medical professor in Brooklyn. 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?

The EKG is normal, a student told me. Her short white coat is pressed. She smells like Ivory soap and textbooks.

And the intervals? I ask sagely. No one ever looks at the intervals on the EKG.

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.

“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…”

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.

My phone blings a text.

[[Had a great time. Loved hearing about your adventures in Thailand, and your views on stem cells. Next time I can show you the stairways of San Francisco – Illyana]]

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?

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.

“I called the CHP and they won’t help me. It’s only 12.87 for a can of gas…”

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.

80% chance of downpour. 90% chance of scam.

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 Brooklyn. 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.

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.

With every death, I lost ground. I lose heart. I lose strength.

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.

Baby Jessica was only eleven days old. She was tiny, small even for a newborn. 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.

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.

We worked her for six hours.

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.

“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.

One percent.

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.

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. Her blood pressure falling. Her brain was frying in her skull.

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.

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.

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.

Every year on Christmas eve, I toast to myself that there is one less orphan in the world, one more mother at Christmas.

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.

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.

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.

I have to believe in my one percent.

One 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.

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.

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.

Ugh.

Lessons learned from the sabre-toothed squirrel

Complete and total dedication to a task, with no thought of danger or self. Utter satori of purpose.

I have much to learn from the saber-tooth squirrel.

What 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.

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.

I'm getting ancy. Now what?


I've considered a number of different choices for my future career/life:

Adventurer! - learn how to kitsurf/climb mountains/track wild boars/etc and go around the world being bold, foolish and attractively useless

Volunteer! - build schools in Asia. Clinic in South Africa, or here in California.

Writer! - write down my innermost thoughts on a regular basis, publish occasionally, wear a black hat, perhaps start smoking?

Filmmaker! - nuff said. Documentary films about medicine. Narratives about anything.

Doctor! - go back into fulltime medicine. Become director of an ED, or hardcome academic medicine. Do a fellowship in Critical Care or Pediatrics.

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.

Dilitante! - do some combination of the above very casually. - this is currently what I'm doing with my life, to greater or lesser success.

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:

Friends
Creative outlets
A girlfriend
Sensual delights - food, sex, beautiful surroundings
Play
Work - something worthwhile, fun and hopefully lucrarive
Adventure

I hope that all of you know the joys and horrors of this kind of freedom. If you have any suggestions, let me know!

Thumb-wrestling with death

Mrs. Mayer was big, flushed and sweaty in a red mumu stained with vomit. She was having the big one.

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.

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.

"You're not going into the light yet!" I shouted at her.

Yes, I actually said it.

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.

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.

That was last week. Now I'm typing away in a little cafe in Budapest, drinking an espresso with Bacardi and ice cream...

...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.

Can I give it up? Am I a living stereotype, addicted to the rush?

The Secret to Eternal Life and Shameless Plugs

Tiffany and I made this short strip, so it's worth another plug.

Was posted on Val's comic book blog: An Occasional Superheroine.

Probably best laid out on Tiffany's blog.

The First Day of the Rest of Your Life

I'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.

Here I am, typing away on my little computer, a million miles from the life I've left behind.

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.

We'll see what happens.

Bring back the dinosaurs

Facebook addiction? Give me a break.

Social network withdrawl. American Idol. Obesity and sedentary lifestyles. Depression. Modern day ennui.

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-
and-you-eat-becase-it-hurts if you were being chased by a Velociraptor?



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.

Think about it.

The secret to Eternal Life

Pretty lame title for a short, but I needed something.

Tiffany, sometimes med student sometimes artist, has illustrated this story into a cute little comic book.

You can see it here at www.tiffanykamerman.blogspot.com.

The actual story is here: (note this was written about ten years ago, so it may seem a little outdated)

THE SECRET TO ETERNAL LIFE

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.

Little Baby Time climbed up the mountain towards him.

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.

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.

“So, daddy-o, ready to take the big plunge?” he said between breaths.

Cyber-punk little shit, Father time thought. These young ones, they have no respect for their elders.

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--”

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.”

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.”

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.

The baby smiled. Greed shone in his huge blue eyes.

Suddenly the old man pointed behind the child. “Look over there!”

The baby turned.

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.

“Sometimes the old tricks work the best,” he mumbled to himself.

Chuckling, he picked up the clock and wound it backwards to one.

“Gets ‘em every time. How do they think I got to be so old?”

It'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.

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!

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.

On a brighter note, Percocets are fun. Especially when mixed with alcohol...

But soon I'll be a real boy again, able to hike and run and play sports.

The Dork Knight Rises Again

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.

I still feel like a kid beating on his computer because he’s not satisfied with the way the world is now. 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

I’m born: Hello, world! Smells like chicken!

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!

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….

Next Year: …go to grad school. Hello black berets, black coffees, bleak attitudes. Make a literary zine. Ride a motorcyle. Crash the motorcycle.

Two years later: Medical school? What? In Israel? Stop shooting at me! Where’s my gas mask?

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!

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!

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….

A million of your attention spans later: Clarion Writer’s workshop. What?

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.....

SEVEN DAYS

The First Day

I am no neurochemical engine simple and clean

no jellied goo of cells and molecules, impulses and streams

for I am the gaunt spirit in the haunted house

the doomed ghost in the mortal machine

“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.

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.

I’m invincible.

“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?!”

“Are you ready?” the pimply bull operator asks in a tired voice.

“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.

“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.

“Ride bull, drink beer!” Joe Bob echoes.

“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.

“Beer shower!” Joe Bob shouts.

“Beer shower!” I mime, spluttering through blood and beer. I hope my nose isn’t broken.

“Ride’r, Drew. Ride’r hard!” Joe Bob yells.

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.

“Ride beer, drink bull!” I shout happily.

“Ride beer, drink bull!” Joe Bob shouts.

“Ride beer, drink bull!” the crowd replies.

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.

The air is so clean, so cold. I have only a moment to swallow my victory. Then the ground smashes into me.

The crowd roars in laughter. Everything is spinning as I lie on the padded sidelines, blood running from my nose, beer in my hair.

“It was so worth it,” I mumble into the nougahyde.

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.

“Ride beer, drink bull, buddy,” he says, chuckling. “Good try.”

“One more time,” I reply. “One more time.”

“No way, Drew, you’re done for the night,” Joe Bob says. He uses my shirt tail to wipe the beer off my face.

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.

“Adrien?” A smoky voice says.

“Mila?”

“Call me Dr. Sanborn,” she hautily replies.

“Uh, sure.”

“You should come to the hospital right away.”

I look down at my legs. I don’t think they’re getting me anywhere anytime soon. Joe Bob shakes his head.

“Sure, why not?” I slur.

***

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.

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.

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.

“Your psych profile,” she says, pulling out a typed sheet.

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.

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.

“Hmm,” she says.

“I’m not crazy, am I?” I ask in a nasal voice.

“Your…extraneous…memories are not internal dissociations or psychosis,” she replies.

“Mila, this is Adrien. I don’t speak Martian.” I say.

“You’re not crazy. You may be receiving transmissions from little green men.”

I hold my head. “Arrgh.”

Mila flips my file closed with a flourish, gets up, and leans across the desk from me. Her face is inches away from mine.

“The brain is a strange thing, Adrien dear. Its not just a lump of grey meat that transmits electricity. It’s more.”

If only she knew.

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.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the MC shouted, “Give some love for Cameron Grey, the hottest sax in nineteen sixty eight!”

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.

Mila crosses around the desk and stalks towards me. I back up, back way up, because I know what’s going to happen next.

“Now I get it. You didn’t call me on a Friday night to go over test results, did you?”

“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.

There are bloodstains on my shirt and I smell like sour beer.

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Grr,” she purrs, making little cat claws with her hands.

“Aw, don’t do the cat thing, jeez.”

Mila stalks forward. I step back into a patient’s bed.

“What about her” I reply, feeling a little bashful next to the crinkly little lady in the white sheet, attached to tubes and wires.

“Oh, Mrs. Lubowski? She can’t hear you,” Mila says with a dismissive wave, unbuttoning the top button of her blouse. “She’s been coma for the last forty years. Just look at her.”

Mrs. Lubowski 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.

But her eyes are open.

Ice blue, cataract-stained eyes, rimmed with gelatinous discharge, stare boldly up at me. I jump back in horror.

“I am looking, Mila. And she’s looking back at me,” I stammer.

Mila looks down and sputters. “Mrs. Lubowski?”.

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.

“Mrs. Lubowski?”

Mrs. Lubowski turns to her, and then to me, her eyes wild with freedom.

“Mrs. Lubowski, you must lie down.”

Mila tries to push Mrs. Lubowski back in bed, but the little old lady resists her efforts.

“Adrien, could you give me a hand here?,” Mila pleads. “Adrien?”

Adrien?

Who is Adrien?

She is talking to me, but I don’t recognize the name.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Mrs. Lubowski, you need to sit back down!” Mila bellows. “Hey! Dennis! I need some restraints here.”

Dennis, a sweaty armed dude in inappropriate pink scrubs, pulls out some leather cuffs and tries to put one on her arm.

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.

“My… name…”

Mila, Dennis and two other nurses surround Mrs. Lubowski. Each have a leather restraint in their hand.

“is…MISS…”

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.

“Lubowski.”

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.

Her rheumy ice-blue eyes darken. Blue shifts to violet.

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.

She is not moving away. She is coming closer.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“I…am…”

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.

“not…married.”

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.

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.

“You. Help me up.” She says.

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.

Mila looked at Ms. Lubowksi, then at me, aghast at the sudden calm.

“What is your name?” she asks.

“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.

“Call me Victoria,” she asserts, and shakes my hand.

When she learns my real name, she might not be so friendly.

***

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.

Dirty socks on the floor. Unwatched Netfliks DVDs on the TV.

Inside the closet is a shoebox taped with duct tape. I pull the tape off and photos inside fly everywhere like escaped doves.

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.

I flip open Adrien’s cell phone and press 911.

“Hello?” the operator answers.

The gas can burbles as I spread gasoline liberally across my former life. I drop the phone in the middle and light a match.

“Hello, are you okay?” the operator calls out.

I drop the match.

The Second Day

…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”

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.

“Just talk to them, Cameron. Make them understand.”

I nodded.

“Don’t be afraid. They’re people, just like us,” I said into the mike, trying to catch their eyes, soothe their fears.

Then the tanks rolled forward. The water cannons started to spray, then the screams…

I try to hold onto the memory but it leaps from my fingers like a half-forgotten dream.

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.

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.

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.

She frightens us all.

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.

She speaks without opening her eyes. “Don’t think I don’t know what happened. A woman knows.”

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“About the coma. That I’ve been sleeping for forty years,” she says, opening her eyes and turning towards me.

“Like Rumplestilskin.”

She laughs and pats my hand with a trembling arm. She seems so peaceful.

“It must be a hell of a thing, Miss Lubowski—“

“—Victoria—“

“—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.”

“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.”

I nod. Power and wisdom do not always coexist.

“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.”

…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…

“Everyone I’ve ever known is gone now, either dead or moved on. I’m alone.”

“How do you know?” I ask.

She doesn’t answer. She runs a hand through her hair. Thick grey strands fall off in her fingers. “It is a horrible place.”

“The ICU?” I asked.

“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.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“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.

“I don’t get. Your treatment hadn’t been changed in ten years. Why did you wake up? Why now?”

“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.”

She sighs. “I need to get out of here. To go home. Help me up, will you?”

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.

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.

“What the…” I say, flabberghasted.

“Let them feel what it’s like for a change,” she chuckles, and then coughs up a wad of dry grey phlegm.

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.

Her easy power is incredible.

Dangerous.

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.”

“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.”

“I can’t imagine,” I say sympathetically.

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.

She cocks an eyebrow at me. “Maybe I’m just a silly old lady, but I think you do understand.”

***

Indeed I do. Adrien Priest doesn’t, but I do.

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.

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.

The Dreaming doesn’t have to be a delirium. It can be a delight.

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.

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.

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…

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.

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?

Make me one with everything.

The Third Day

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.

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.

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.

Victoria ambles down the main staircase with cantankerous grace and a radiant smile.

“Let me cook you breakfast, my dear,” she says. “As a reward for your chivalry.”

Some reward.

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.

I read from the paper to her, brushing salt out of my hair. She doesn’t

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“Nothing has changed,” she says. She folded her wrinkled white hands on the table, peppered with liver spots.

“What?”

“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.

“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….”

“Also car thieves, lawyers and alcoholics, I’m sure.”

“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.

“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.”

I butter a piece of dry toast to within an inch of its life to give it flavor, then hand the knife to Victoria.

“You have me,” I said.

She looked down at my hand. “Giving someone a knife can cut a friendship. You should know that.”

I laugh, pure and strong.

“You must think I’m a superstitious old lady,” she chuckles.

“So give me a penny for it and I’ll stay.”

“Not for long, dear. You won’t stay long. You’re on the run.”

I don’t ask how she knew, or try to deny it. I just nod.

“I’ve awoken in a new world, alone,” she says sadly.

“I know how you feel.”

“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.”

“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.”

“There has to be a way.”

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.

A magpie lands in a treebranch outside and cawed raucously. She glimpses it and then looks back at me with mischievous eyes.

“One for sorrow, Two for joy, Three for a girl,” she intones.

“Four for a boy,” I say, against my better judgment.

“Five for silver,” She replies.

“Six for gold…”

“Seven for a secret, Never to be told,” she answers. “You still haven’t told me your name.”

***

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Now I remember everything. I know who I am.

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. So I don't go by those names anymore.

Just call me Lucifer.

The Fourth Day

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.

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.

Little moments.

A magpie lands on the bannister, too arrogant to join the feast. He eyes me. Something’s wrong. The magpie flaps away, cawing.

The moment is over. I raise my hand against the early morning glare. An engine roars and tires screech.

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.

I should have known this was coming. He’s too smart to fall for my little pyro trick.

“Drew, what the heck has gotten into you?” he shouts across the unkempt lawn.

“Good morning to you, Joe Bob,” I reply.

“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?”

I fold my arms across my chest and shrug.

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.

“What’s gotten into you?” he repeats. “What are you up to?”

I shrug.

“I’m okay, Joe Bob. There are some things I’ve got to do.”

He squints his eyes and looks down at me, trying to pry out the truth. He sighs.

“All right,” he slurs, laying a heavy hand on my shoulder. “All right. You just take care of business, Drew.”

“I will, buddy. I will.”

Joe Bob walks back to the F150, shoulders slumped, and drives away. I walk back inside, climb the steps to Victoria’s bedroom.

Victoria has disappeared, and I see a young woman lying on her bed in a bank of new-fallen snow.

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.

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.

“Good morning,” I says.

“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.

“I’m not in the mood to cook. Go out for breakfast?” she asks.

Thank all that is holy.

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.

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.

“The town is completely different now.”

“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.”

“About Lauren--” I say.

“--I know. Car accident.” she nods with ancient sad eyes.

She sighs. I don’t bother to ask how she knew.

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.

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.”

“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.

“Now, it’s a yuppie cafe.” I say.

“Yuppie? Is that a kind of dog?”

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.

“They’re all gone. They’re gone, and I’m here.”

“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.

“I’m famished. Want to stop here?”

Victoria looks up at me with those too-bright blue eyes. “Sure.”

“See, there’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you—“ I say, and then freeze.

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.

I take Victoria by the shoulders and turn us both in the opposite direction.

“On second thought, maybe we should eat in,” I whisper in Victoria’s ear.

I can feel her smile on my cheek.

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.

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.

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.

We lay in the bed, the setting sun sending rays across our naked bodies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

The Fifth Day

I nurse my morning coffee daydreaming of lives past.

…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.

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…

Victoria’s hands on my shoulder bring me back to the present.

“You’ve always been behind their eyes, love, watching and waiting through so many lifetimes. Waiting for the right time.”

I looked up at Victoria with alarm.

“Now I understand what you were trying to tell me yesterday.”

She slid her narrow hips around me and sat on my lap, wearing only one of my shirts that barely fell midthigh.

“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.”

She knows.

“You’ve been waiting for something. A sign. A gift. Well, I think your prayers have been answered.”

I smirk. “Delusions of grandeur don’t become you, my dear.”

“I can restore your dream. For years I fought against old mores, old traditions. Now I have the power to break them all.”

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.”

“You don’t know how many times I’ve heard that, Victoria.”

“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.

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.

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.

Victoria flies beside me in a gown of shimmering white. She reaches out for my hand. I pull away.

“Did you create this?” I ask.

She shrugs childishly. “I’m not sure. Perhaps. Perhaps it always existed and I’m just looking at it.”

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.

“Stop!” I shout, “Stop it. This is crazy! You have no right!”

I can’t stop her. I’m not sure she can stop herself.

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.

She isn’t making a new world.

She is recreating Earth.

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.

As the Earth flashes underneath us, we see modern history reenacted. 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.

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.

We stand on top of today for a sheer still moment.

“Are you ready?” she asks.

“Hell no!”

A golden flash emanates forth from the center of the UN.

“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.”

I shake my head.

“Beware of your wildest dreams, Victoria. I have seen this foretold before by the Summer Host. You want to bring the Rapture.”

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.

“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.”

She counters. “Even the greedy ones can get everything they desire. I will give it to them.”

“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.”

“Your way is too slow, old man.”

Suddenly we are sitting in her living room again. Sunlight falls on hardwood floors, the willows creak gently overhead. Her eyes are sad.

“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.

“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.

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.”

Victoria looks stunned. “It’s only…”

“A drop of blood?” I shout. “No, not anymore. Not after what you’ve done.”

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.

“Victoria, we have to go,” I say.

“What? Why?

“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.

“Well, I’m not going anywhere until you do,” she says, crossing her arms.

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.

“Fine. It’s about time you learned of the truth.”

“Yeah,” she replies sarcastically, “What ‘truth’ is that?”

“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.”

Victoria raised an eyebrow. “I’m listening…”

“The old gods still rule from within. They manipulate, they wait for their turn to enslave humanity, Yahwe the worst among them.”

“Yahwe? You mean the god of the Old Testament.”

“Exactly. Her.”

“Her?”

“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.”

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…

“Just because I played Rasputin and came back from my coma. Stranger things have happened…”

“And stranger things will come to pass. I won’t lie to you. I had plans for you, big plans.”

“I know, my dear,” she says. “But I have plans of my own.”

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.

“Lucifer, step away from her,” Mila commands in a dark voice.

“Mila, I’ve never seen this side of you before,” I say, eyeing the back door. “I think I like it.”

I should have known that Mila would be involved in this. The Summer Host have always had their syncophants.

“Your honeyed tongue won’t get you out of this one, Lightbringer.”

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.

“Gabriel?”

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.

“We…you…naked….ew! You’re my brother!”

Mila flushes.

I shudder. “ I’m open-minded and all, but that’s a bit much even for me.”

Mila restores her self control. “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.”

“Her? You’re not here for me?” I ask. “I’m hurt.”

“Get over yourself, peacock. I’m here for her. The one.”

That’s impossible.

“No. I don’t believe you. She can’t have escaped.”

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.”

“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.”

Victoria clears her throat, hands on her hips, indignant.

“Excuse me, folks, but I’m in the room, you know. You can talk to me.”

Mila turns to Victoria. “Yahwe, my lady, come with me.”

“I’m not Yahwe, Gabriel. My name is Victoria Lubowski and I’m not going anywhere. I have work to do.”

I don’t think I’m going to like this.

“I’m going to save the world,” Victoria says simply. “From idiots like you.”

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.”

Mila’s stomach bulges. Victoria and I take a step back.

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.

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.

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.

Gabriel. Azrael. Uriel. Greatest of the Seraphim. My brothers, my enemies.

Azreal is a stitch in the world, a black aching rift, a crack into the heat death of the Universe.

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.

“She is too dangerous, brother,” Gabriel broadcasts on the upper cosmic.

“She threatens Summer,” Azreal’s voice is deeper into the ultravoilet, barely visible on the edges of human vision.

“She threatens everything,” Uriel finishes in quick radio pulses.

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.

“Stand back, brothers. This can only end one way.”

“The Dreaming has unmade you, brother Lucifer. You still are trapped in the flesh. Open yourself to the Light and remember.”

Remember? Remember what?

“Remember,” Gabriel says, and shows me what I have been trying to see.

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.

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.

1969, seeing the sun broken as a thousand glittering shards on the wet pavement. 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.

The tanks and troops attacked the crowd. I locked eyes with Victoria and through her to the essence underneath.

“I can stop this,” Victoria said.

“You can’t. You have to let it happen,” I said.

“I won’t—“ she said.

She raised a hand glittering with power, and I prepared my defenses. Her first strike lashed out--

Victoria waves a hand and the memories fade.

“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.”

The Radiant Host pauses. Victoria looks at me expectantly.

“What?” she cries. “I thought you wanted to change things?”

I shake my head gravely and take a step backwards. Victoria’s eyes flew open in shock.

“Lucifer?”

“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.”

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.

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.

Victoria is a newborn sun of energy. I can see now that she is Yahwe reborn.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gone.

Three of the greatest of the Radiant Host destroyed. Victoria turns her gaze to me.

“Is this what happened forty years ago?” she asks. “Is this how we got where we are now?”

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.

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.

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.

Victoria catches my wrist in her hand. With a twist of her arm, the bones in my arm shatter.

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.

Fourth heartbeat.

“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.

“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.”

She kicks me in the chest. I fly backwards into the wall, boneless. My ribs snap like dry twigs, spine twists.

“Now I’ll break yours.”

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.

My heart explodes. The Dreaming finds me again.

The Sixth Day

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.

Joe Bob rolls his pickup on the lawn again. He jumps out angry. The sun rises hot behind him.

“I’ve had enough of this crap, Drew. Come out of there.”

The house on Mulberry street is quiet. The willows creak in a subtle breeze. The front door is missing.

“Buddy?” Joe Bob says cautiously as he walks in the empty doorway. He sees the door half-broken across the room, and catches the smell. Blood and shit. The smell of death.

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.

“Drew? Drew!”

Joe Bob picks up the body. The head rolls to the side bonelessly.

“Oh, shit, Drew. What did you get messed up with?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

The flames die away, leaving a naked me. I shake off the ash and look at myself. Reborn from the ashes again. Hurts.

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.

“Drew?” Joe Bob whispers.

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.

“No, Joe Bob, not Drew. Not anymore.”

He shakes his head in disbelief.

“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?”

I shake my head. We lock eyes. I can see him searching me for something familiar. He can’t find it.

“That crazy doctor woman did it. I’ve heard what they can do with those MRI machines.”

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.

“It was the memories, wasn’t it?” he says sadly.

I nod.

“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.”

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.

“He did, buddy, he did.”

“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.”

Joe Bob nodded slowly.

“Everyone changes, Joe Bob. Everyone changes. Adrien isn’t dead. He just isn’t here anymore.”

I flash him a bittersweet smile. You don’t live thousands of years without getting a little sentimental.

“I’ll miss…him.” Joe Bob says.

“No, you won’t,” I reply.

“You’re not going to…” he whispers. “Kill me?”

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.

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.

I open a sungate, give Joe Bob a wink, and step away.

***

I step out of the sungate onto the wadi. 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.

An ancient produce truck rolls up the road towards me. I raise a hand and the farmer pulls over to let me in.

“Salaam Alekum,” I say.

“Alekum Salam,” he says in Arabic. “Are you also on your way, pilgrim?”

I nod.

"Allah has struck a blow on the terrible Israelis, and given us a new garden of Eden."

"Have you seen it?" I ask him in Arabic.

"I have seen it in my dreams."

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.

It’s beautiful.

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.

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.

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.

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.

What must never happen again.

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.

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.

The sun sets on the sixth day.

The Seventh Day

I meet Victoria for the last time in New York.

I feel her like an ache. She is the precipice. Everything that had stood for thousands of years threatening to fall.

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.

“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.”

“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.

“I can end all wars, all strife. We can all live in peace.”

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.

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.

I compact myself into a white core of hyperdense matter the size of a grain of rice. I gain speed, flattening myself against time.

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 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.”

She shakes her head sadly. Grey storms boil in her eyes.

“You misunderstand me. This is not a request.”

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.

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.

“It is done,” she says.

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.

The Earth actually curves slightly towards the my gravitational ripple. I have become a light cone of directed probability at speeds approaching c. I am heralded by a gravity wave like an avalanche, with a virtual mass that dwarfs the Sun.

“Victoria. I’m sorry,” I project softly, lovingly, before my thoughts turn to teeth.

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.

I plummet through the atmosphere and enter Victoria at one percent beyond c. She boils away in nanoseconds. All that remains of Victoria is a radioactive crater on the UN floor, smoking with a few remaining proteins.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I have become myself again. I suck in a breath of sweet, sweet air. I look down at my flesh and pinch myself.

“Whew,” I say. “I love being meat. I mean me.”

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.

“Lucifer? What happened?”

“You killed me, dear. Don’t worry, I forgive you. Then you tried to remake history. I couldn’t let you do that.”

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.

“When are we?”

“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.”

Victoria scowls. “I don’t understand why we’re fighting, Lucifer. I thought we wanted the same thing.”

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.

“Look at your creation.”

“I am looking.”

“No, look more closely,” I say. “Look past the beauty.”

I can see her face change with realization.

“It’s dying.”

“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.”

“Ultimate power doesn’t necessarily mean you can fix everything. I learned that a long, long time ago.”

Victoria’s hair is playing in the breeze, and there is a bittersweet smile on her face. She sighs.

“This is why you brought me here.”

“Actually, Ali here makes the most amazing Shwarma.”

Ali smiles and cackles. He slices ground lamb into a metal scoop, and pulls the pita bread directly off the grill.

“Spicy?” Ali said in heavily-accented English.

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.

“Bite?” I ask Victoria, holding it out to her.

She folds her arms and turns away from me.

“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.

“But they’re destroying themselves.”

I shrug. “They’ll learn.”

“What if I can’t wait that long?”

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.

Victoria looks up at the stars.

“Very well,” she says, resigned. “There’s an entire galaxy out there. I will start my own world.”

“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.

She looks down at her creation.

“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.”

“Why am I letting you tell me what to do?” she asks.

“Because you know I’m right.”

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.”

“Tempting.”

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.

I let her hand fall.

“I can’t. My place is here. My kids need someone to look out for them. Goodbye, Victoria.”

“It’s bad luck to say goodbye, Lucifer. Let’s say something else.”

I say the only thing that’s honest. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” she says. She touches my face gently, her eyes already lonely. “See you again.”

Her body twists and flattens, disintigrates into light, and filters down into the blood marble.

The world is safe again. For a little while.

“Ali, I’ll take another.”

***

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.

Sometimes I remember what the marble means. I think about Victoria and her perfect world and I wonder if I could ever join her.

Joe Bob sits down at the bar next to me, his stool creaking. He has a black ring around his right eye.

“Hey, stranger,” he says.

“Hello,” I say, not even looking up.

“What brings you to Knoxville?”

“Just passing through,” I say the same way I have a thousand times before.

His eyes find the blood red marble in my hand, and he stares into it. Patterns swirl in the surface. He seems hypnotized.

“What’s that?”

“That? Nothing really. Keepsake.”

“A lady, eh?” he asks. “I bet there’s a story there.”

“Very perceptive,” I reply, flipping the marble into my palm and shoving into my pocket. “Get you a beer, stranger?”

“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.”

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.

“Sure, why not?”

-e2k.8