Off Center In The Attic

by Mary Deal

  As I lay motionless for the CT Scans, the softly lit tube-like structure I'm pushed into reminds me of the cylindrical hollow through which I returned to the body after my odyssey. A great peace fills me. Time to get my bearings. When I try to take stock of where I am and what's going on, internal light rushes in and shows me different pieces of my life for which I have no answers, and answers come. When I divert my mind away from the stream of mental activity to think separate thoughts, the stream continues still. Simultaneously, I receive information on different levels and finally, I'm so awed at the wonder of the brain that I can't stop the tears. The mental capability I had hoped for in life is right here stabilizing inside my head. I'm getting an overdose of the enhanced mental capacity that Ruthie talked about.

  Being prepped in the operating room, I no longer wear the oxygen mask. I'm seeing everyone in a different light. Literally. Auras, Ruthie had called them. “Auras,” I say as loudly as I can. “Auras.” Said she could tell a lot about people depending on their glow. I didn't believe her, but I'm seeing auras and everyone in the room glows differently and it has nothing to do with the room lighting. I want this heightened acuity. I want it forever, no matter how the nurses look at one another and shake their heads in pity. I smile at one nurse and she sympathetically pats my arm.

  After another examination, Dr. Malcolm says, “In his condition, we won't need anesthesia.” Two nurses roll me over. I catch a glimpse of the clock. 11:55 p.m. Mentally, I check out on a vibrant stream of thought because I have no idea what gruesome thing they'll do that would normally require deadening. I can't feel my body below the hips anyway and need to get away from that prospect as well.

  My thoughts are diverted back to the present when I hear the doctor say, “We're seeing too many of these.” I hear the clank of the bullet drop inside a metal pan. “Single-round nine-millimeter surplus military bullet. Luckily, they don't expand.”

  “Single round? A shooter without an Uzi?” someone asks. “How archaic!”

  Their laughter assaults me in waves as if someone turned the volume of a stereo up and down again and again. Hilarity in an operating room? Truly these people have seen too much of this.

  “Bit off a chunk of the L-4, then ricocheted into a muscle,” the doctor says. “Pretty clean wound, not a lot of damage.”

  “This one's lucky,” someone else says. “But look at the condition it's left him in.”

  After a needle is poked into my forehead a couple of times, the choking stench of cauterized flesh reaches my nostrils. I roll my eyes upward and, from a new direction, watch a seamstress sew, the skin on my forehead her fabric. It's curious knowing I'm being scorched and patched and rolled onto my back unable to feel any of it.

  “Only time will tell,” the doctor says. “Let's get him to Recovery.”

  “Not so fast,” a nurse says. “Look… look!” So I try to look too. “His leg lifted,” she said, “He started to bend his knee.” She taps my leg though I only see and not feel her do it. “Again,” she says. “C'mon, move it again.”

  Nothing happens and I collapse backward clinging to the memory of my spirit odyssey for comfort.

  “He needs time to heal,” someone says. “Reality hasn't set in yet.”

  I can't be paralyzed. I just can't be. Some force inside won't let me cling to negative thoughts. My mind carries a new breath of life. In spite of my trauma, I'm feeling better than my best self again.

  Finally left alone in the dimly lit recovery room and listening to the vibrancy of silence, the new energy pulsates inside my brain. My mental processes still function at such an alarming rate that my senses remain raw. Every once in a while, I perceive a glimpse of what surely must be the gross reality of this situation that one nurse mentioned and I begin to shake uncontrollably. I'll have to control my fright if I'm to understand all that's happening. I'm not going to listen to anyone telling me I'm paralyzed.

  According to what Ruthie had said, in spite of the energy slowing down a bit after a few years, the process lasts and because of that, she had found a new level of intelligence. Is that what I have to look forward to? Anything you put your mind to will be intensified, she had said. Oh, please, let it be so. I'm concentrating on walking again.

  The woman whose very sanity I scoffed had been right. I've got to find her. I've been awakened to the real reason to live and it's right inside my brain.

  The clock on the wall says 12:58 a.m. In a little less than two hours I've had a peek at both heaven and hell and continue to witness energies inside my body that doctors never see. Though I've gained something yet indescribable, I presently cannot feel my lower half and push away the thought that it'll be a while before I'm normal again.

  A door opens and I struggle to turn my sore, stiffening neck muscles to look in that direction. A nurse shows someone in. It's Karen. She hesitates, looks at me strangely. We might have been lovers tonight. I remember wearing a trendy new suit I bought to impress her. The idea comes to me that the shooter might have thought I was a rival gang member working his territory because my suit was dark. Karen finally comes close to the bed but doesn't reach to take my hand.

  “I arrived just as the ambulance took you away,” she says as she holds her arms locked at the wrists against her stomach. Her aura is pulled in real tight around her. She doesn't light up the room like some of the doctors and nurses. She isn't crying or emotional. She's too aloof and just going through the motions. I don't have a chance with her now. Bubbly, active, on-the-move Karen won't want half a man. She's already shut me out.

  Another moment of reality sets in. Who'll want me in this condition?

  Wishful thinking causes a lump in my throat and I feel pathetic as she stares. I thought that at least she'd take my hand. Another reality check. Things are changing too fast. Well, I'm not letting her or this set-back keep me down. I've got a new life to live. I'll find Ruthie.

  Bit off a chunk of the L-4, the doctor said. Ricocheted into a muscle. Not once did he say my nerves were damaged. I felt the nerves in my legs tingle just after I re-entered my body and later in the ambulance too. Though I can't feel my legs now, it may only be due to shock. I'm not going to be paralyzed. I'm going to keep moving and pick up right where I left off. If I'm to be confined to a wheelchair while I heal, I'll need one with a motor because I don't plan to vegetate. Reality can stay away till I find sanity again.

  Once more, the door begins to open, but slowly. Brilliant white light pours in ahead of the figure of another person slipping into the room. What an aura!

  Karen glances toward the doorway and then back to me as if nothing too unusual is happening. I'll bet she doesn't see auras. “While I was waiting for you to come out of surgery, I called Ruthie,” she said, “to talk, because I felt so bad for you.”

  I focus on the other person. It is Ruthie. She smiles and comes forward. Karen seems relieved to fade into the background with her diminished aura while Ruthie's glow envelops and comforts me.

  “You're healing already, aren't you, John?” Ruthie asks as she takes my hand.

  The moment she touches me, a charge of bonding energy connects us. Ruthie had once explained that doctors had begun prescribing Healing Touch for hospital patients and that she had become a practitioner. Oh yes, touch me again. Teach me.

  I choke back tears. I try to speak and can't. I want to thank her for coming. Yet, all I can do is weakly squeeze her hand and wonder what is happening to me. As quickly as I wonder, my mind tells me that what I have in common with Ruthie is very real. Like her, I'll study and write about my experience. The reality of what has happened tells me that if the mind is capable of accelerating, people should be able to reach this heightened degree of intensity and clarity without having to experience a trauma. I've had a new life thrust upon me, a new reality. The room glows. I'm here, I'm rational, and I'm sane, although like Ruthie, I may have a lot of trouble getting people to believe it.

  Looking for a Life

  In my teens, I liked h
unky guys; in my twenties, hung with guys who were fun. In my thirties, I looked for a successful man; in my forties, for someone who held his looks and physique. In my fifties, I sought a wealthy retiree. In my sixties, too late, I wondered what I had to offer.

  Most Wanted

  “Take this precious child into your loving arms,” the minister was saying. His eyes were closed as he clutched the Bible and tilted his face toward the sky.

  Many people attended the funeral service and showed up at the gravesite for what could only be to pay the most final of respects. They came in a show of support. Some of their sons would be next.

  Wind snapped the canvas awning but there would be no rain today. Just a week earlier, Jeremy had managed an innocent smile and was able to say the rain was over for the season. In spite of his lack of vitality and inability to move so much as a limb, he had said it with such an air of finality, as if the rain would never come again. His mother knew that the end was at hand for him. Still, she prayed for a miracle that would let her only child live.

  With the weather finally warming, most people wore everyday clothes of varying colors. One didn't have to wear black to mourn anymore, but who was the gaunt looking man dressed in death's color from head to toe who hung back from the crowd? He paced between rows of headstones, stopping frequently to take long pulls on a cigarette. Some respect!

  Jeremy was the third boy in the neighborhood to succumb to AIDS in a short period of time. No one knew how the boys had contracted the HIV virus. Some say it was the children's dentist, one of only two in their small town. The two who already died, plus Jeremy and the others that had crossed over to full-blown AIDS, had dental work done in the same office. Yet, that dentist had been tested and did not have the HIV virus; nor did his assistants, nor the hygienist. Even the sterilization procedures of his instruments had been scrutinized and no irregularities found.

  “It came from somewhere else,” Viviana said.

  “Oh, Viv,” Mavie said, whispering and leaning close and cradling Viv's shoulders. The metal chairs on which they sat clanked together as they shifted in the soft grass and earth.

  “No irregularities?” Viv asked, barely choking out the words.

  “About what?” Mavie asked. She leaned back into her chair but took Viv's hand onto her lap and held it tightly.

  Someone firmly gripping her hand was like having a life rope tied around her while she was unable to hang on of her own accord. “My son,” Viv said. “Killed by his dentist?”

  “They haven't proven that,” Mavie said, still whispering. “They're still investigating.”

  Viv could only hope for some answers. The wind blew fresh against her face and she was thankful for that. Not wishing to wear black, but deciding a spring dress would be inappropriate, she had worn a navy blue dress. The noontime sun beat down, and in spite of sitting under the awning, the heat was becoming unbearable. Viv felt as though she might faint. She wished to die to join her beloved son. Jeremy would never again breathe the fresh air that he loved as he skateboarded and played basketball or swam. Maybe the HIV was in the water in the public pool.

  Frank sat mute beside her, more from shock than from having nothing to say. In his son, just experiencing manhood, lay his hope for the accomplishments he hadn't known. A pernicious HIV strain had quickly devoured their only child and his friends and turned them into zombies. This was what the other parents had yet to face.

  “Too many boys with AIDS,” Viv said.

  “Let the living know that this child came into our lives,” the minister said, “to bring joy and spread light as only a child can offer.”

  Why had investigators waited so long to interview the boys, waited till they needed a respirator and were too weak to care? What did those boys have in common that they weren't saying in order to protect one another? What guilt were they harboring? Had they made some sort of pact to protect those they were leaving behind from embarrassment or harassment? Surely, once diagnosed, each must have known the finality of their fate.

  “First Scott, Larry a month later. Now Jeremy.”

  “Shhh,” Mavie said.

  “The doctors say Freddie's likely the next.” Viv knew them all. After Freddie, Tommy might be next. Then Eddie. “All the boys played sports together.”

  Someone behind placed a hand on Viv's shoulder, a nice way of telling the mother of the deceased not to disrupt the service. She didn't care. She wanted to lash out but was too choked up to scream. Out of respect for Jeremy's last rites, she gritted her teeth and kept her mouth closed.

  The man in black sauntered over near the foot of the burial plot opposite the minister. What was it about his eyes, a look of evil with his collar up against the wind? That image hiding behind the deep collar, mocking, almost strong enough to negate the minister's final words.

  Momentarily, Viv thought she might be trying too hard to put the blame on someone else. “All I want is to know…,” she said, whispering to Mavie more quietly as she also touched the reassuring hand on her shoulder.

  “Shhh,” Mavie said lovingly into her ear. “We'll talk after this is over.”

  “And so today,” the minister said, “we lay to rest a child becoming a fine young man, full of curiosity about the wonders that life had to offer.”

  The man in black had disappeared. The hand on Viv's shoulder pulled back.

  “Ashes to ashes,” the minister said.

  Her tears continued to spill over. Mavie guided her and Frank to where they were to stand. Everyone threw single roses onto the coffin or picked up and sprinkled lose earth. One by one, through her tears, the colors of the others' clothing came toward her. She heard their consoling words, yet their faces were a blur, and she could only nod. Even when she wiped her bleary eyes, tears continued, running freely.

  The smell of stale cigarette smoke assaulted her nostrils. Who was he? She had to see his face close up. She dabbed at her eyes just before he grabbed her hand. He didn't shake it. The hand hung limp, like expecting her to take the initiative. His face was chiseled, a little too bone thin and sallow, like a walking skeleton. A chill went through her. Something about him made her think of the devil himself!

  “I'm sorry for your loss, Ma'am,” he said. Somehow the sentence didn't seem finished. It ended upbeat, as if he were gloating. Viv pulled her hand from his. He almost smiled as he stepped aside for the next consoler and quickly disappeared.

  About a week after the funeral, Frank called to her from the living room. Other than watching the news and some nature shows, he and Viv seldom watched TV. It was Jeremy's toy. He preferred shows on Nova or the Nature and History Channels. The Hospice folks had removed every trace of their care of Jeremy and left no reminders. Those were in Jeremy's room, but the door remained closed. Yet lately, TV noises filled the void usually taken up with Jeremy's chattering about topics he found interesting and by his eagerness to get on with life.

  “Viv!” Frank yelled again. “Come here! Hurry, Viviana!”

  She went right away. American's Most Wanted was airing and Viv paid little attention, even as Frank implored her to sit.

  “Why?” she asked. “We don't watch this stuff.”

  “Watch this time,” he said.

  So she did. She saw nothing she needed to know. America's Most Wanted had been responsible for the capture of yet another perpetrator. She was thankful for that. “Frank, please,” she said, begging. “We don't need this kind of distraction.”

  “Watch!” he said.

  The next segment to air was about a man named Logan Brooke who had assaulted boys in other states across the country. He had disappeared from the areas nearly ten years earlier and his whereabouts were unknown. An old picture of a man's roly-poly face flashed onto the screen. Viv's stomach felt squeamish at seeing the seemingly innocuous image of someone who could be a pedophile. The next flash of news made her tremble violently and almost faint in her chair. When the boys in California began dying of AIDS, each began telling their horrific stori
es. Logan Brooke had been positively identified as the man who spread the HIV virus to young boys on the west coast!

  “Could that be it?” Frank asked, gasping and leaning forward in his chair. “Could it be him?”

  Viv strained to see. If Logan Brooke had been infected with the HIV virus ten years earlier and had spread it, surely he would be just as close to his own demise. If that round pasty face, that now seemed vulgar, could be artfully drawn to have the look of death….

  John Walsh spoke her very thoughts. “Even though the virus causes a person to wither, their bone structure remains the same. A forensic artist provided this rendition of what Brooke might look like today.” The artist's rendering of a very sickly looking Logan Brooke flashed onto the screen.

  Both Frank and Viviana jumped out of their seats.

  “It's him!” Frank said. “He disappeared because he came clear across the country. He did it! I'll bet he did it!”

  “That is him!” Viv said, screaming and pointing. “He was the gaunt man in black at Jeremy's funeral!”

  Grandpappy's Cows

  Grammy and Grandpappy had fifteen youngins o' their own, so I had me a mess o' cousins. Most of the boys looked the same, with straggly dirty blonde hair and mean squinty eyes. We girls was better. We looked different from one another by our hair color and sizes of our bosoms.

  Grandpappy moved lots of us to a run-down trailer park near the railroad tracks. Him and Grammy lived in a doublewide next to the meadow 'cause they kept a milk cow. As neighbors moved out, more of our kin moved in. No matter the trailers was abandoned 'cause they was old, we was a family that stuck together. Pretty soon our kin took over every useable trailer in that danged weed-infested field. The poor folk thought we was rich.

  Everyone who visited asked to go see the rest of them empty trailers. I sneaked and seen 'em already and they was empty, except for some mattresses the hobos left behind. When I asked why my uncles brought their girlfriends around to inspect those old trailers when they went out on dates, Grandpappy said, “They just want to bless our new home.” Then he'd slap his knee and bellow till his eyes watered and he started to coughin'. He refused to let me go see with the other people and got downright nasty when I tried. “You stay put, li'l girlie,” he said. “There's time enough to learn about life.”