CHAPTER FIVE

Officer Walcott was noticeably younger than I. If I had to guess, I’d say that he was in his early thirties. He was clean-shaven, with blue eyes and thick, black eyebrows. On his head, he wore a gray stocking cap, with “Police” printed prominently on front. It hid his short, black, militaristic-fashioned hair but I still remembered it from our previous encounter.

When he asked if Cinnamon was keeping me company, he asked it in an indirect kind of way. He had moved his eyes off of me and seemed to be staring at something behind me, off into the distance, when the words left his lips. Such was his posture and tone that I wasn’t actually sure if he was speaking to me, to Cinnamon, to both or to neither of us.

Chiming in before I could answer for myself, Cinnamon claimed, “Yes I am.”

I was paying acute attention to the interaction between the officer and his dog and, in doing so, I hesitated to say anything myself. Walcott seemed to pay his companion no mind. Was he ignoring him or did he just not hear him and, more importantly, I wondered: how was it that I found myself in a situation where I was even asking this question?

For the first time that night, I suddenly began to wonder if some part of my brain had been damaged in the accident, causing me to hallucinate or, if that wasn’t the case, if I was perhaps unconscious in a hospital bed somewhere, drowning in the delirium of my own mental coma. Was I actually there at all—physically present there in that moment? How could I be sure? Then again, how can anyone ever be sure of that, at any point in life?

Was this a dream perhaps? At the time they are occurring, dreams seem very real. In most cases, it isn’t until we awaken that we begin to pick apart certain elements that seem absurd to our waking minds. While we’re held captive by the dream, as it unfolds around us, it doesn’t seem absurd at all.

I was noticing the ludicrousness of my situation at it was unfolding in real time though. Did that mean I’d achieved some sort of lucidity within my dream or did my apparent cognizance of everything—my ability to recognize the absurd, that is—point to the fact that I was actually awake?

And who’s to say our minds are functioning more precisely once we’re awake anyway? Maybe the dreaming mind is the one that’s operating correctly, or at full capacity, and the woke one is simply the side effect—the less powerful alternative we’re forced to endure, while the subconscious mind recharges itself in preparation for the next time we sleep.

The dreamworld was certainly more interesting than the insipid one that had imprisoned me for the last forty-one years. With that in mind, perhaps the more pertinent and pragmatic question should have been: Do I even want to wake up, if I’m dreaming? What if the reality to which I would awaken was actually much worse than this current Hell I’ve created for myself?

Up until now, I had accepted Cinnamon for what he was but seeing how another human being reacted around him caused my curious mind to race. Walcott seemed unconcerned with any of this. As I pondered my situation, his gaze left the space behind me and met mine directly. Once he acquired it, he maintained his eye contact on me and waited patiently for an answer.

I thought about asking him if his dog could talk, which reminded me of that joke I very much liked. Taking a metaphorical step back, I decided against such an inquiry. I didn’t want them putting me in some kind of a psych ward—not before my doctor got the chance to do it himself on Monday, that is.

I also thought better of telling Walcott that I recognized him. Ultimately, I decided Cinnamon was probably right. It wasn’t the right time to try and chitchat with the officer. And so, teeth chattering, I simply responded to the question that Cinnamon had already taken the liberty of answering for me: “Yes, sir. He’s keeping me company. Thank you.”

At that moment, Walcott started to present me with a blanket he had been holding under his arm, when his radio belched out a garbled message from dispatch. The ambulance had been derailed from its mission, for some reason that was unclear, but a new one was now en route.

“Copy, Dispatch,” he affirmed, pressing the button on the intercom that rested just below the front side of his shoulder. As he did so, the blanket fell from under his arm and landed within my reach. He didn’t seem to notice.

While he spoke, I sat up, determined to utilize the garment to alleviate the cold as best I could—especially on my feet. My left leg felt broken and the severity of the throbbing pain it had been forcing me to endure was beginning to escalate. In a slow and careful manner, I relocated my right foot, from underneath the car, and brought it toward my left foot, until my right and left feet were touching each other. At that point, I tucked the blanket under them, like some sort of modern-day mummy.

“Suspect is in my car,” I heard Officer Walcott explain, with his head turned toward the device on his shoulder, as I worked on my new wrappings. Oblivious to my struggles below, he and the mysterious voice on the other end of his communicator continued to exchange information for a short time. Toward the end of their dialogue, I heard him say that he would continue to “gather additional evidence” while we waited on the ambulance. The muffled dispatcher then acknowledged him and faded silent once more.

“Keep him company,” he then instructed Cinnamon. “An ambulance will be here soon. I’ve got another patrol car coming too.” Then he flashed a warm smile and said, “Holler if you need me. I’ll be right over there.”

“The sooner, the better,” I grunted, in as upbeat a manner as I could muster. “My leg is killing me.” I had a growing fear that the damage was worse than I had been allowing myself to believe and it was becoming harder to hide the truth from myself.

At almost the same time I gave my response, Cinnamon bellowed (nearly talking over me, as he did so) a very simple, “I got this, Walcott.”

“It won’t be long,” Walcott said and, with that, he disappeared into the crowd once more.

Walcott wasn’t quite as I remembered him. He still seemed to be logical and in control of the situation—he still seemed “professional”—but he was lacking the compassion I remembered. I assumed he was simply overwhelmed by all of the moving parts of our crime scene; regardless, I was glad that he was the one in charge. I didn’t need him to be my friend, after all. I needed him to be a good cop.

I didn’t let the officer’s odd behavior concern me too greatly; in fact, talking to another real human being had elevated my mood quite considerably. I was cold and my body felt broken but, in him, I had just found new hope that my mind might still be intact!

“If it makes you feel any better, I can tell you that he wouldn’t walk away from you if he thought your life was in any real danger,” said the talking dog next to me. Hearing his voice put an immediate damper on my newly-acquired optimistic outlook.

“Oh. Okay.”

“I mean, your leg is meeeessed up,” he went on, “but I don’t think you’re going to get any worse than you already are.”

“Thanks.” That joke—the one from before, about a talking dog—suddenly found its way back into my head again and I felt compelled to try and use it to lighten the mood a bit. “Hey, you wanna hear a joke?”

“I don’t like jokes,” he grunted, with a bit of derision in his voice. I imagined, if he might have been human, that he would have raised one of his eyebrows, as he said it.

He actually made no faces that were uncharacteristic to a dog at all. With his mouth remaining still, I was forced to consider the possibility he was communicating telepathically. I speculated over asking him to explain this for only a moment, before ultimately deciding that the explanation would only confuse things more and waste more time.

“Sooo, you and Diane. Six months ago. Panic attack, on the restaurant’s bench…” he said, in an attempt to entice me to finish my story.

I realized that talking to Cinnamon about everything, though difficult, was, in a way, therapeutic. I tried to let that notion guide my words and so, with a positive frame of mind, I attempted to delve back into describing the traumatic evening that, for some reason, had caught his interest.

“Right,” I began. “So anyway, I felt it coming on. I KNEW it was coming, as we were sitting on that bench. I remember telling Diane, ‘I feel like I’m about to have a panic attack.’ She asked me if it would help to walk around a little. I said ‘yes’ and that’s the last thing I remember.”

“So you blacked out?”

“Diane told me that she remembered me putting my head on her shoulder. She told me later that she thought I was just trying to be funny so she moved her shoulder away and that’s when my entire body just collapsed into her lap. I don’t know. I’m not really sure how I fell. This is her recollection, mind you. I wasn’t conscious for any of this.”

“That must have been when we got the 911 call.” Almost on cue, the sound of the nearing ambulance seemed to rise an octave or two.

I accepted Cinnamon’s prompting and continued. “She said my breathing was shallow and the people in the crowd were all worried.”

“And that was from a panic attack?” he asked in a way that was both skeptical but also affirming.

“Here’s how I rationalize it: think of a computer—an older computer actually. That’d be an even better analogy, I think. Let’s say you’re on this computer and you’re runni—”

Another interruption: “Computers are those little rectangular screens that humans stare at all day—like the one Walcott has in his car, right?

For a moment, I had almost forgotten I had been speaking to a dog. In this perceived distortion of reality, I recognized that I wasn’t sure what presuppositions I should employ with him. Deciding it would take far too much time to describe the nature of computers, I simply replied, “They are,” and then, “You might not understand all of this but please just bear with me.”

Though he seemed to be trying to fight it, I then saw Cinnamon’s tail wag, which was comforting, but the maddening sirens were forcing me to raise my voice to the point where they dismantled most of that comfort. They were close. Probably within the scope of my vision, had I been standing.

Pushing past their wails, I went on: “So you’ve got this older computer and, while working on creating a sales report, you’re also messaging friends, listening to music, uploading pictures and you’ve got an article pulled up in your internet browser that you were reading from earlier in the day.

“Then, all of a sudden, the screen just goes blank.” For dramatic effect, I paused here. I don’t think it produced, in him, the outcome I had intended and so I picked back up slightly dejected. “There was too much data to process and it overloaded,” I explained. “Well, that’s what happened to my brain. Too many foreboding and negative tiles coming toward me. Dying alone, guilt, purposelessness, failure, unresolved conflicts, an inability to change… These thoughts and many more were all represented in these rectangular tiles, circling my head and they were all descending upon me—all at once. It was too much to process. Not enough computing power to handle it all. My brain just shut down and had to reboot itself, like an old computer.”

That last sentence—it seemed as though I had spoken the first part of it at a much higher decibel than the second half for, in the middle of vocalizing it, the sirens had gone silent. I listened for a moment and then heard a door slam shut. They were here.

***

I left Cinnamon in silence, to digest my commentary, while a young man in hospital garb approached us. He had mid-length, well-kempt, reddish-brown hair and a beard to match. I placed him somewhere in his late twenties, although it was my assertion that he was trying to deceive others into believing him older, with the addition of the aforementioned beard. If that was indeed his goal, I can clearly attest that, with me at least, he did not achieve it.

Kneeling down beside me, as Officer Walcott had done, the young emergency worker began a dialogue with me, assuming, like Walcott and Cinnamon did, that I went by “Buddy.” I supposed that there were worse colloquialisms they could have chosen and so I accepted the greeting without insult. “Hey, buddy. You doing okay?” he asked.

“I’m cold.” It seemed the most relevant and pressing ailment so—odd as it may seem—I had no trouble prioritizing it over my throbbing leg and head.

“I bet,” he said, in a reassuring tone. “We’re going to get you loaded up and out of here, as soon as we can, but first I’m going to need to brace your head and neck. I want to make sure they’re not going to be bouncing around when we move you, okay?”

“I would nod but that would seem counterintuitive.”

This caused a laugh and not just a polite one. I could tell he actually found it humorous. That’s good, I thought. Get him in my corner early. “I’ve actually been moving it quite a bit already,” I then admitted.

“Well, don’t move it any more, for now. I want to do a quick check first. Can you tell me what your name is?” he asked while performing a visual scan of my head and neck area.

“James Singer.”

“Nice to meet you, James. I’m Jeff.”

I gave him an obligatory smile—the kind I would give when I knew I was supposed to smile but I didn’t really want to do so. I had to be careful not to display too much enthusiasm; I know it’s asinine but I feared that offering too much positivity would somehow signal my consent for him to abandon his duty of tending to me.

It struck me then, at that moment, that, since regaining the ability to speak clearly, this was the first time anyone had bothered to ask me for my name. “My name,” I mumbled to myself, as my brain began to flood with additional content from the night Cinnamon and I were describing. “That was the first thing those people in the crowd asked me too.”

“What’s that?” Jeff asked, as he meticulously and over-cautiously turned my head slightly to the left so that I was facing Cinnamon and the sobering truth that our postponed conversation might have reached its conclusion.

“Nothing. Sorry.” I knew Cinnamon must have heard me too. We stared at each other in silence but I could somehow tell.

Pushing down around my neck, Jeff inquired as to my tolerance to his intrusions: “Can you feel this, James?”

“Yes.” I continued to stare at Cinnamon.

“Any discomfort? Any pain?”

“Not really.”

“Can you feel right here?” Jeff pressed.

“Yes; I can feel that.”

“Good.” Mirroring his delicate assault, on the other side of my neck, he asked, “Do you remember what happened?”

I was sure my answer wouldn’t be helpful and that any explanation I gave would only postpone me from getting into the warm ambulance waiting behind me but I answered diligently, nonetheless: “Not really. I was jogging around the neighborhood, like I normally would, and then, all of a sudden, everything went black.

“I was awake but… but I couldn’t see anything, ya know? At the same time, I felt my body bouncing all around, like a pinball. It didn’t hurt though; it was really more confusing than anything. I just kept thinking: what the heck is going on? And then,” I offered, “when I could see again, I woke up under this car.”

“Okay, well, I’m sorry to say it, Bud,” (he had forgotten my name already), “but it looks like you were hit by this car that you’re lying under right here.” I wanted to tell him sardonically that my elite powers of detection had already deduced this but I let my chattering teeth bite my preverbal tongue instead. “Can you wiggle your fingers and toes?” he then asked with concern.

I affirmed that I could and then I did it, thinking he might ask me to prove it.

“Good. Now, I know you’re cold but are you in any pain right now?”

“Yeah; my leg. It hurts, if I try to move it.”

I assumed, as that old joke suggests, that he would recommend I don’t move it but he didn’t take the bait, much to my relief. I bet he’d heard that one a million times anyway.

Looking over my left knee, with much dismay on his face, he explained, “Well, I’m not an investigator or anything but I’d say your knee here was probably the impact point. Try to keep it still, okay?”

“Okay.”

Apparently done with his initial assessment, he finally began to offer a little more insight. “All right, well, the good news is that I think your head and your neck are probably okay, which is actually pretty remarkable. We’ll need to get you some X-rays and have a doctor look at you to be sure, of course, but the initial indicators look promising—at least to the point that I’m not too worried about moving you onto the stretcher. Still, we’re going to brace your neck just in case.”

“So, you think it hit my knee?” I asked that question, to which I already knew the answer, in hopes that it would prompt Jeff into offering some additional information. Luckily, it did.

“Again, I can’t say for sure but, looking at the windshield, it looks like the back of your head and your right elbow actually went through, before you rolled off, over the top of the car.” He then paused for a moment and yelled out instructions to someone by the name of Tammy: “Tammy, let’s get the stretcher and a neck brace out here!” Turning back to me he said, in a much softer voice, “You just try to relax. We’re going to get you onto the stretcher and in the back of the ambulance in just a minute.”

“Please hurry,” I implored. “I’m freaking freezing. My teeth are starting to chatter.”

“I can hear ’em. I think even the neighbors can hear ’em. Just hold on; we’re almost there.” At that moment, as Jeff’s footsteps trailed off behind me, I decided I liked the young emergency worker. He had a good bedside manner to him.

As I turned my head back toward Cinnamon, I began to assume that, through various distractions, I had squandered my opportunity to speak with him. “Well,” I began to tell my furry friend, “I think that’s going to have to be the end of our conversation.”

No sooner did those words exit my mouth than I noticed the increased output of the strobing police and ambulance lights, which surrounded the only background my prostrate body could see. Each passing second, they seemed to grow noticeably brighter. Up until this point, they had been more of a minor, muted sort of ambiance, but one to which I had seemingly grown accustomed—like a flickering light in an office building that’s just out of reach.

“What’s going on with the lights?” I asked Cinnamon.

The snorty sneeze, with which he replied, didn’t do much to comfort me and, before I could follow up with another inquiry, I had to involuntarily shield my eyes with my arm. That’s because, in almost no time at all, the lights had become almost unbearably bright!

Although I could do nothing other than cover my eyes and wince, I heard a conversation erupting between Cinnamon and another masculine voice, outside the range of my vision. The masculine voice boomed but I could not ascertain the language it was speaking. It wasn’t like any spoken language I had heard before.

Curious to put a face to this new character—especially since he and Cinnamon could apparently understand one another—I moved my arm a bit and allowed my head to turn his way. Squinting, I was surprised to see that he himself was the source of the pulsing blue and red light; it wasn’t coming from a siren at all. He was carrying it, over his shoulder, contained in what looked like some sort of light-emitting ball.

It was a large sphere—much larger than his blurry head—and looking directly at it caused me to continue to have to squint. After a minute or so, however, my vision slowly became more accustomed to the glow.

When I was finally able to behold the character I had been straining to see, I was absolutely dumbstruck at what I observed: a roughly ten-foot-tall, bald… “thing,” clothed in nothing more than a pair of gray boxer shorts—spattered in tiny, conspicuously-placed red hearts—and an open lab coat (complemented by an unusually large stethoscope, which hung from around his neck and contrasted greatly against his otherwise bare chest).

His strange attire, however, was little more than a descriptive footnote, when compared to his third, blinking, working eye—larger than his other two and protruding right out of the middle of his bald forehead. Over his shoulder, he carried that pulsating ball of light and kept his two, smaller, human-like eyes fixed on Cinnamon—while investigating me with his larger, remaining eye.

Mouth gaping, I stared, without even the slightest idea what to do or say. Jeff and a large woman dressed similarly to him, who I could only assume was Tammy, walked right in front of this lumbering behemoth and knelt down beside me. One of them must have had a stretcher because I could feel my body being adjusted onto a cold plastic slab underneath me but I didn’t actually see it. That’s because I couldn’t look away from the strange creature I’ve been describing. My mind was able to focus only him—this three-eyed, hulking anomaly of humanity.