My mind’s reunion with my body changes everything. They’ve always had a strange relationship, the mind and the body, not only in my case, but across humanity in general. What the mind believes is power. Belief is a force that can dominate the physical self. For better or worse.
Belief is not the same as truth. It can be, but often it’s not. Every once in a while the truth finds a way in. It chips away at false belief steadily, like surf that changes the shape of a shoreline over thousands of years. Sometimes truth arrives as a merciful deluge that rinses all the choking grit of deception away, and sometimes it’s a flood that drowns the known world. The truth can kill.
Sara and the kids leave me alone at Marina’s command: there will be no distressing discussions in front of her father that might adversely affect his condition.
Marina is more upset than any of us. I want to tell her everything will be okay, even though I’m not sure it will.
When they go, I try to follow. The door to my hospital room is still propped open wide. There’s nothing to stop me except these tons of life-supporting equipment that pin me down. I don’t know that I’ve sunk into the bed until I try to get out of it and my physical limitations become clear. All the forces that brought me, finally, to this dim place will not let me leave it. This coma holds me in its tight grip. This is my new truth—not death, but some altered state of life.
The voices of Dylan and Sara grow fainter as they walk away, following the brisk clicks of Marina’s shoes in the hall.
I don’t like hospital rooms. I don’t like the false optimism that floats around on the grim scents of cafeteria food, though I understand it. All anybody wants is comfort. To make it through the day, the lifetime, with as little pain as possible, inflicting as little pain as possible on the people we love.
This is all I wanted for Marina and Dylan. It’s the reason I didn’t tell them about the affair that drove their mother to her grave.
I shut my eyes and make a last-ditch effort to go with them. I focus my mind on their faces. I wait to be transported, to be tossed back into the air, weighing nothing. Instead, I grow heavier, until I can’t even open my eyes anymore. No more sunny panoramas of vineyards or shorelines for me. No more desperate darting around.
A flicker of resentment flares in my mind, then dies.
At the moment, my mind is an empty theater. I’ve come in alone and taken the center seat in the center row. The narrow venue has just one sloping section of seats and no stairs, no balcony for throwing popcorn down onto moviegoers’ heads, no gaping cup holders for supersized, superpriced sodas. The armrests under my palms are threadbare.
My heart is oddly full of anticipation, something like relief that I got here before the feature left town. For a faltering second I wonder if the theater might not show the film with only one man here to see it. I didn’t even buy any concessions. Maybe I should go do that. I feel a little hungry.
The lights dim and the trailers begin, but I have trouble focusing on the images. They’re blurry, indistinct, and silent. There are voices out in the hall, faint and garbled and fluctuating. Someone laughs, a pleasant sound. The fading light shifts as the door opens to let others in. Bodies shift and bustle and bump into the theater’s springy seats. The dark silhouette of an overweight woman moves through my row. She brushes against my legs and jars my toes, then to my surprise turns around and places her hand on my knee. She apologizes. I wonder why she chose this row when every other one is empty, but my mouth can’t form the question.
I smell food and wish it was for me.
Someone takes a seat behind and just to the right of me as the previews end and the screen blinks to black. The dim lights fade out completely.
It stays black. The darkness is so thick that my eyes can’t adjust. It’s easy to imagine some old guy upstairs, sleeping on a tilting chair in the projection room, the way it was back when movies were fed one reel to another. Is that the whisper of misthreaded film forming a pile on a distant floor? Has silence swallowed all those other people who came in? There are no throat-clearing, bum-shifting, child-inquiring noises to hold the terrors of darkness at the margins of the room. Anything can happen in such a place where the few exits are hidden, where there is no life but yours for the monsters to target.
Restlessness rouses my heart. I sit forward in this old, creaking seat and put my hands on the armrests, bracing for the unexpected. Already I feel wary of another unpleasant revelation. A large hand comes down on my shoulder. A firm hand, warm and broad at the palm, powerful but gentle. Not a monster’s claw.
“Be still,” the man instructs. I freeze. He laughs kindly but fails to put me at ease.
“It’s not a light story, but it should end well,” he says.
His fingers tighten over my collarbone.
“What’s going on?”
“You’re dying.”
Yes. I saw myself lying on the bed, alive only in a technical sense. But this theater setup—it’s not what I expected. Nothing so far is what I expected. That flicker of anger in my heart flares into a steady flame.
“I thought I already died.”
“Jim Davis died. Crushed by your truck. You’re still working on getting there.”
City planners expect the fatality to delay the project . . . Not my fatality, someone else’s.
“But I believed—”
“In your lifetime you’ve believed a lot of lies, and disbelieved a lot of truths,” the voice says.
“Whose fault is that?”
“We’re going to get that sorted out now.”
“I’m not stupid,” I insist.
“No, you’re not. So try to relax, Garrett.”
His announcement fills me with dread.
The movie starts, and the lights that bounce across the velveteen chairs—they might be red, already I’ve forgotten—cast more shadows than assurances. I look back to see who has spoken, but my mind plays more tricks. I feel no hand, I see no man.
The mind is powerful, I tell you.