by Rose, Willow
And in the next moment I would laugh hysterically over nothing and be extremely grateful for the simplest things, like sugar in my coffee or the feeling of the wind in my hair when I went outside, basically just being happy that I was still alive. Then the feeling would change out of the blue and I would suddenly feel guilty for being alive, for surviving when so many people around the world died meaningless deaths every day of hunger or in natural disasters. I asked myself constantly why I had to be the one who was allowed to come back. Why did I get a second chance? Was there a meaning to it after all? Was there a purpose, did I have a purpose on this planet?
I had never believed in those things before, but for the first time since my mother’s death I felt doubt. I knew what I had seen. I knew it was true. There was something greater than us out there and I had seen it. I had been there and felt how wonderful a place it was. A place where I had felt no pain or sorrow.
I became almost obsessed with life after death. I wanted to read about it, I wanted to talk to everybody about what they believed in, what they thought happened to you when you died. I drove Maria nuts with all my questions that she had no time to answer with all her housework. When Heather came home from school I would move on to her and start bothering her about it. She had no patience with my newfound search for purpose, and soon I realized that I was alone with this. No one believed that I had actually seen my mother or those other people. It was all just in your brain, they said.
I didn’t care where it was. I wanted to figure everything out. I was looking for explanations. I knew I was rambling about this, but I just couldn’t help it.
Chapter 9
A week later they called from the paper The St. Augustine Record. They wanted to meet with me at the house and talk to me about the attack.
"A personal interview about the accident," a woman who called herself Julie Goldman said.
With Dr. Kirk’s advice in mind, I allowed them to come and ask a few questions. "But only until I get tired," I said. "Then you have to leave." I still suffered from a weakness that didn’t seem to want to let go of me. I was still in pain from my wounds, and the voices and images constantly flickering in my head left me exhausted.
Julie Goldman was a woman in her late thirties with that efficient look in her eyes that ambitious women often have. She was flanked by an older man with a camera around his neck. We sat in the patio furniture in Mrs. Kirk’s rose garden behind the house, and Maria served us iced tea. She smiled widely before she left us to ourselves.
“So you had only been in Florida one day when this happened?” Julie Goldman asked while the photographer circled us and took pictures from all sides including several close-ups of my bandages. It felt a little intimidating.
“Not even an entire day," I answered. "I had just arrived that same afternoon. Some friends and I just wanted to go out and have a nice evening in the park. We knew it was wrong to go in when it was closed, so you really can’t say we weren’t warned. We were just being stupid, I guess. It was careless of us to go in the water. I know that now.”
“It must have been quite a shock. To be attacked by two alligators.”
“It was.” I took in a deep breath as some of the pictures from the night flashed in front of my eyes. The moonlight in Heather’s eyes, the kiss, the carelessness, the water and then the sounds under the water. The sound of me fighting for my life, the growling sounds from the wild animals. I could still recall the shock from when I was pulled under water. The feeling would haunt me now and then, both in my dreams and while fully awake. The realization that life can be taken away from you in a split second. That you are, in fact, never safe. I had felt safe that night. I had felt peace, but it was taken away from me and it was hard for me to trust life again, to trust that something bad wasn’t going to happen to me in the next second or so.
“Tell me a little about when the alligators attacked you. People always talk about alligators when they think of Florida but we actually seldom have attacks on human beings, so I think people would be interested to know how that felt.”
“Well I guess I didn’t feel much. I was scared of course.”
“Afraid of dying?” she asked and drank of her iced tea. Condensation water from the glass dripped onto the table and left a dark spot on the wood. The sound from the water drops was extremely loud in my head. It was like I had all of a sudden become sensitive to sounds I had never noticed before. It could be water drops, or clocks ticking, a child bouncing a ball somewhere or someone talking even people I couldn't see.
“I guess. I just remember being pulled really hard in my leg and then being under water,” I said and drank as well. I felt my heartbeat under my shirt. I didn’t like talking about this part of my story. It was like it came too close or something. I didn’t like remembering all this and reliving it. I sighed and wiped sweat of my forehead with the palm of my hand.
“I can tell this is difficult for you to talk about. Is that true?” Julie Goldman asked.
I nodded. “It is still very close.”
She smiled like she understood, but I knew she didn’t. In fact, no one seemed to. But how could they? How could they understand that I was changing? That something this big changes a person. How could I expect them to understand my obsession with life after death and with the predator that had become my savior? I couldn’t. I had asked Maria to get me books from the library on near-death experience, and I read them all night. I had cut out every article I could find on jaguars in the newspapers and read every book about the animal that Maria brought me when I asked for it. I knew all there was to know, and yet I knew nothing about what had happened to me or why it had happened.
“Tell me instead about the jaguar. It must have been real frightening to be face to face with an animal like that.”
“But it wasn’t. I mean, at first I was afraid, but then …" I stopped myself as I looked into the journalist’s eyes and realized that she didn’t understand what I was saying. She would never understand.
“You weren’t afraid of it?”
I wanted badly to explain to her how the animal had looked me in my eyes and somehow reassured me that it wasn’t going to kill me, but I held back. I had no words to explain it properly so she would see it the way I saw it. “I guess I wasn’t afraid of dying anymore,” I said instead.
The blond journalist looked at me with skeptical eyes. “You weren’t afraid of dying? How can that be?"
“Because I had already died once,” I said. “I died in that water with the alligators and then I rose above everything and saw the whole thing from above. And I saw my mother. She was there, too. She was waiting for me.”
“Your mother? And she is also dead?” She talked like she thought I had definitely lost it. I couldn't blame her really.
“Yes. She died nine years ago.”
The journalist rubbed her forehead with her hand. “So, just to clarify. You died and had a near-death-experience is that it?”
“Yes.”
“Then you saw a lot of dead people or was it only your mother?”
“I saw a whole bunch of them," I said. I didn't like where this was going. The character of her questions told me that she thought I was crazy. Explaining a thing like this to someone who has never experienced anything supernatural is close to impossible. "They were welcoming me. That's what I wanted to tell you. There is no need to be afraid of dying. It isn't a horrible thing. The only reason we are afraid of it is because we don't know what it is. What's waiting for us. But I kind of think that I might have been sent back to tell everybody about it. To tell them not to be afraid.”
As I stopped talking I realized she was staring at me with wide-open eyes. An awkward silence followed and I knew for sure she didn't believe me.
“And then what happened?” she said, sticking to the story and what she could actually put in her article without scaring off the readers.
“I went back. I saw myself being dragged out of the water by the jaguar and then I felt th
e pain. I opened my eyes and looked into the face of the jaguar. At first I thought it was going to kill me but then … well, it didn’t.”
The journalist took notes on her pad while nodding. “And so how do you feel today?”
“I am good, I guess. I am still in some pain and I think a lot about life and appreciate everything a little more …” I paused. The voices in my head had become louder all of a sudden. They were drowning even the sound of my own voice. I couldn't hear myself talk any longer. I drank and shook my head slightly as I tried to stay calm and overhear them, pretend they weren't there. It usually worked, but not this time. Among the many noises one voice seemed clearer than the others. Tell her. Tell her, it repeated until I couldn't bear it any longer. Tell her now! Then it happened. I said something that neither of us shall ever forget:
“By the way. You should keep the baby.”
The journalist looked up from her pad and stared at me. I put a hand on my mouth when I realized what I had just said.
“What?”
To my surprise I didn't come up with an excuse or a simple explanation. I didn’t tell her I was rambling or pretending I hadn't said anything. I considered all of those, but as I opened my mouth something else came out of it. Something completely unexpected.
“You should keep the baby that is growing inside of you even though your boyfriend doesn’t want it. It will be your last chance to ever have a child,” I continued.
What was going on? It was like it wasn’t me talking, but it was me. I just couldn’t control it. I had no idea how to stop it. I had to say those things. Why did I feel such an urge to say that? Why couldn’t I just shut up?
She stared at me still with wide-open eyes. The photographer stopped taking pictures and stared at me, as well.
“You think I am pregnant or something? Do I look pregnant to you?” she said and got up from her chair. She put her notepad in her bag with angry gestures.
I shook my head. “No you don’t … on the contrary. You look great. I …” I was speechless. There was nothing I could say to explain this. What had gotten into me?
“This is the strangest interview I have ever done,” she said and looked at the photographer. “I think we are done here.”
I got up from the patio furniture immediately. “I am so sorry. I have no idea where that came from,” I said as they rushed out of the yard and back to their car. They drove away without so much as a polite goodbye.
I was really losing it, I thought to myself standing abandoned in the yard. Maybe that was really it. I was just going crazy. Plain old-fashioned insane. Up until that night I had been the most stable young man, one who believed in nothing that he couldn’t see or touch or the scientists couldn’t prove, and now I was talking like this? And even insulting this woman? What had gotten into me? Was I just completely stark raving mad? I remember putting my hands to my head and running my fingers through my curly hair, wondering if the next thing would be me pulling my own hair out.
"I have to get off these drugs," I mumbled to myself. "That has to be it. That is what is causing this. The drugs are what is driving me to this. These voices, these images. This is not me. This is not who I am." I decided to go back inside and call the doctor immediately to make an appointment and get me off the pills. I would rather have pain from my wounds than endure this. This had to be far worse than any pain I could feel.
That was when I noticed that I wasn’t completely alone. In the garden next door was a little girl. The same girl I had seen standing outside the neighbor's house staring at me on the night I had arrived. On the night of the accident. The youngest of the three girls I had seen playing earlier. She was hosting an imaginary tea party sitting at her small table and wearing a big fancy green hat with a peacock feather in it. To the day I die I will swear that I saw the teapot floating in the air next to her while it was pouring imaginary tea into two floating cups. Unfortunately, I blinked a couple of times to make sure there wasn’t something wrong with my eyes, thinking they were deceiving me, and as I looked again the cups and the pot were sitting solidly on the table. The young girl had moved and now stood at the fence and was staring back at me. Not knowing what else to do, I lifted my left arm and waved at her. She smiled a smile almost as enchanting as her sister’s and waved back. Then she turned around and ran towards the house holding on to the hat with one hand so she wouldn’t drop it.
Chapter 10
The hunt for the jaguar was still on in the Twelve Mile Swamps. Jim had joined a group of hunters that took turns searching for the beast at night, so he only had to go every third night. One Saturday he came to the house and talked to Heather. I was still in my bed even though it was almost evening, feeling confused over my life. I had been off the medication for several days by then and still nothing had changed. Only now I could actually feel the pain in my wounds and it was keeping me up at night, along with the voices and the images that were still there. I found it hard to talk to anyone about it since I was scared they would think I was going mad and lock me up. I wasn't going crazy, I knew I wasn't. These voices were real. What I had seen that night when I died was real. I still knew how to distinguish between reality and fantasy. But no one believed me.
I had carefully mentioned the voices to my physician when I went in to ask to be taken off the medicine. He had decided to take my stitches out while I was there anyway since it was time and the wounds were healing nicely. But mentioning the voices turned out to be a huge mistake. He started asking me questions about the voices, if they were telling me to "do stuff I didn't want to."
"They have been telling me to say stuff," I said.
"Hm," the doctor replied with concern in his voice. "Like what?"
"I told a woman she was pregnant."
"Didn't she know that?"
I shook my head. "No. You couldn't even tell yet."
"So how did you know?"
"I didn't. The voices told me she was."
"Hm." He tapped on the table with his pen. "What else are they telling you? Do they ever tell you to hurt anyone?"
"No. It's more like stuff. You know. Things. I can't really tell what they say most of the time. It is more like words and pictures that makes no sense."
"Pictures? You have delusions as well?"
"I guess. This is bad, isn't it?"
The doctor's mouth turned downwards. He didn't look into my eyes. I was afraid he was going to have me committed right there on the spot against my will. "I'll say we get you off the medicine and then see what happens. You say it all started after the accident, right?"
"Right. When I woke up the voices were there and the images as well. Constantly flickering through my head."
"Hm. Maybe you're just exhausted. Your brain needs rest after a traumatic event like this. Maybe you didn't respond well to the anesthetics after all. It could be some sort of aftereffect. It could also have been caused by the traumatic shock from being pulled under water. Maybe being dead for several minutes caused some sort of damage to your nervous system. Do you have any headaches or anxiety attacks?"
"No."
"Okay. Let's keep an eye on it. Let me know if it gets any worse and we'll have you see someone about it. Or maybe give you some other medication."
"You mean like antipsychotics?" I asked knowing that those were the medications they used for people who had Schizophrenia.
"Yes or maybe a mood stabilizer will do. Something like that might be able to help you. Or maybe we should consider hospitalization if nothing else works."
That scared me. I had heard numerous stories from my father of people in long-term hospitalization for mental illnesses like Schizophrenia and being treated with lots of drugs and electro-shock and never leaving the hospital again.
So I decided the doctor couldn't help me with this. I called him up the next day and told him that I was doing fine, that taking me off the medication had already helped and the voices were all gone. There was no need to worry. After I put down the phone I decided
never to talk to anyone about it again.
On the night Jim arrived to the house I heard Jim and Heather's voices from downstairs in the hallway. Curiosity got the better of me so I went down the stairs and found them talking quietly by the entrance door. I hadn’t quite figured out what was going on between Heather and me any longer, if there was still anything between us or not. We were friends, I guess, and she was being very protective of me always asking if I was in pain, if I wanted anything or if she could do anything for me—which I found really nice. I didn’t know if she looked upon us as a couple, though. We hadn’t kissed since that night in the water and her father had told me to keep my hands off of her, so I did. Furthermore I didn’t feel like being romantic or involved with anyone right now. I had told her that. I was in a state of deep depression, and frankly, I didn’t trust myself or my own judgment anymore. So it wasn’t out of jealousy or because I thought something was going on between the two of them that I walked down there.
Jim was in his green hunting outfit with a ridiculous matching hat. It was probably extremely expensive what he was wearing but for a city boy like me he looked ludicrous.
As I came closer, they turned and looked at me. “Chris we were just talking about you,” Heather said.
“About me?” I was surprised.
“Yes,” Jim said. “I have come to take you out of here for awhile. We think it’ll do you some good to get out a little.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, no. Is this some sort of an attempt to rescue me from myself? I don’t need that."
“I think you do,” Heather exclaimed. “You stay in that room all day and do nothing. It is not healthy.”