15

It was better not to wake. Waking was a room just to my left, beyond, and I knew as soon as I was aware of waking, saw it as a threshold I could cross, that it was too late. I could not go back.

I wanted to stay as I was—as I had been. There was, however, no slipping back into full unconsciousness. There was a sensation that time had passed. There was no particular event, or series of changes, that made me believe this, and I was aware that this sensation impressed me as unlikely. But even doubt is an event, an experience.

There was an interlude, a long period of almost sinking back again. I was aware, but did not attach myself to this awareness, out of focus, dazed into a near-slumber that I knew I had just ascended from.

Something was wrong. Something in me would not be still. This urging was a cricket, ceaseless. I could not silence this nagging, bright inner-voice.

Not yet, I longed to convince myself. I could wait a little while longer. But I was forced to begin to wonder how badly I was hurt. It was not that I remembered an injury, no accident, no fall, no stunning impact. But I knew that I had been unconscious, and some instinct made me try out the word hurt.

I slept again, but it did not last.

My awareness returned. I was hurt. I was hurt badly. There was no pain, but there was a sensation of water in my lungs, of cold and a heavy weight on me, in me. I tried to breathe, and I could not. I could not take a breath.

And then I was afraid. I could not block the fear: I was in pieces, dismembered, scattered. There was no reason for this fear except that I knew, deep beyond hope, that I was mortally injured.

I tried to call out, and I made no sound. I could not so much as whisper. I had felt cold before this moment, but now I felt the chill throughout my body, and I tried to move.

I tried to move.

There was no life in my arms and in my legs, no power in me to twitch a finger, stretch the tendons of my legs. I knew I must be paralyzed, willing to address the horror intellectually, in a fragmented way, to fend off the full realization of my condition. I opened my eyes.

It was not a darkness like any I had ever seen. I thought my eyes were gone, the nerves surgically severed. I thought some sickening dislocation had ruptured my body, an explosion or the impact of a car.

I wondered, with an odd lucidity, whether I would die soon, if this shard of consciousness was what my nervous system seized on, a benign separation from the trauma, the sort of addled bliss one hears that people enduring great cold experience.

I had to do something to break my silence. I needed help. I tried to calm myself, but it was futile. I tried again to breathe and the full horror of what was happening pressed down on me. I had not been dying. The dying was before me, yet to take place, and it was going to be agony. It was beginning now.

At that moment, I could move.

One hand, my right, shifted upward though the dark. I felt a tingling numbness, as though the circulation in the limb was poor. I drew my hand up my chest, a cuff whispering over a shirt front. The fingers continued over a cold surface, buttons, a jacket’s lapel. I touched my face, and there was no feeling.

And then there began to be feeling, in my fingertips, in my lips. It was the inactivity, I thought, the disuse of my nervous system that made me so numb. The engine of my body was just beginning to turn.

My eyes hurt. My fingers found my eyelids. There was a hard plastic lens on each eye. I pried each seal free and blinked. The plastic disks shifted, falling away on either side of my face.

Now I could see. But there was nothing. Only dark.

Okay, I told myself. I’m blind. That was bad. That was very bad, but not the worst thing that could happen. I stretched my hand out and up. It did not travel far. At first it was a welcome sensation. I was feeling something with my outstretched hand.

I pressed my hand flat against the fabric surface that was not far from my face. For a moment it was a relief to be able to feel something so exterior to myself, and a source of hope that I was at last able to use my senses. I patted the satiny surface, trying to imagine its nature, and guessing. And rejecting the guess as impossible.

I began to cry out, virtually soundless screams, breathy, empty cries. I couldn’t open my jaw. I pounded on the soft cloth surface with my fist. I hammered against a surface that made almost no sound, my blows muffled by the fabric and the feeling of a great weight beyond the barrier of wood and cloth.

I rolled myself to one side, and then to another, shifting my weight, pushing against the side of what I sensed to be an adult-sized crib, trying to reassure myself that surely I was in some ambulance, or in a medical facility where the attendants had momentarily left me in a chamber used for CAT scans, or perhaps I was in one of those grim fixtures, an iron lung.

I knew I wasn’t blind. I was seeing what was really here. There was no light, an absence of even the hint of variation in the flat perfect darkness. Above the top of my head, below my feet, around me in all directions, was a box, a padded container.

I squirmed, then bunched my body, spasming, every muscle straining, I tried to call out, feeling my way around this prison. My nose was clogged with wadding. I dug the cotton free with my fingers. I forced my jaw apart, struggling, pulling out what felt like thread. With a strange absence of pain I pulled a needle from my gums, and another.

I tried to sit up and struck my forehead. I kicked, ripping at the cloth above me, clawing at the hard, slick-varnished surface before my face, suffocating as I fought the dark.

And then, at last, my lungs dragged in a breath of air. The right lung filled slowly, and I could feel the spongy airsack inflate and falter, sodden and disused. I coughed. I took in another breath and both lungs unfolded, breath growling in and out as I coughed, hacking, spitting, and half-swallowing cold sputum.

I gasped, my mind swimming, as I wondered if I had been stricken with pneumonia. But I was breathing. I cried out. My voice was a churn of phlegm and air, an animal bawl more than a yell. I took in another breath. I released it in a cry so loud it hurt my vocal chords and made my ears ring. Again and again I called, until my voice was ripped, strained soundless.

But they had heard me. They were hurrying to where I lay, reassuring smiles on their lips. Here they were, surely, the sounds of my fellows.

It was going to be all right. People are kind to the injured, and make provisions for them. I was misunderstanding the nature of my confinement. Light would break into my world, light and a caring face. I readied something to whisper, a message of gratitude that I could express with what was left of my voice.

I would apologize. How silly of me. What a mistake I had made. I would have to put it into words for them. I would laugh as I said it, laugh until my guardians were laughing too, at the outrageousness of it, the mad, hilarious blunder I had made.

I would tell them what I had thought had happened to me, and I would hear them repeat it to each other, to the others who ran up to help, to see what had happened, to join in my reunion with reassurance.

But there was no light. There were no voices, no smiles. What had sounded like hurrying steps was only the sound of my own heart, startled into contraction, stumbling into a pace that matched my feelings. The air tasted mineral and dank, and it was scented, too, with the essence of the box that held me, cabinetmaker’s wood stain and furniture wax flavoring each breath.