“Oh, man,” Ricky said softly. He tapped his fingers lightly on the cover. “This book, this is the one we're not supposed to see. The one nobody was supposed to see.”
Should we stop reading it? I ask.
“No,” Ricky says as he slides it towards me. “You need to read every bit of it. Every last word.” He then looks around the room, through my patio door, past my balcony, and beyond.
His eyes searching the darkness, he says, “ . . . you need to read this book as soon as possible.”
Why, though?
“The world we lived in two hours ago,” he says cryptically, “ . . . it no longer exists.”
Chapter 21
Jack's apartment.
Sunday afternoon . . .
A cold front moved in, making it quite pleasant outside. It was in the lower 60's, which I love. So I'm out on my balcony, sitting back in a reclining green plastic chair that is shaped like a large crocodile. I'm not sure if this kind of furniture is standard in all of the Lyndon B. Johnson Health Manor apartments, or if other people have different furniture—like fish and horse chairs.
I even considered asking this nice old man that walks around the parking lot picking up coke cans, but this morning I saw him wearing the crushed cans as a necklace and figured any answers I got out of him would be unreliable at best.
People in a County funded medical environment, like the one I live in, they often have big issues. And most of them look just fine . . . on the outside. But inside their heads, where certain wires are crossed, or uncrossed, there's all sorts of crazy going on. Some of them, I hope, will eventually become useful members of society. But if I was a gambler in a past life, I'd put all my money on powder keg. These broken people, that look okay, they're casualties.
Burnouts.
People like that, that are always in need of medical or psychiatric assistance, they don't know it, but their days are numbered. Somewhere there is a truck bumper, or a construction crew, or a baseball bat with their name on it. Because—and I'm only barely 5-months-old here—the world we live in is cruel and indifferent to the class that doesn't fit into any mold.
Take Ricky for example. He's intelligent, with financial means that I dare not question for fear of a felony indictment. But take away the money and the smarts—two things that you'd have to get to know him to learn of—and he's just a stoner with no marketable life skills. Because I know him I see the hidden genius in him. The paradox. But other people, like the doctors he works with at the hospital, they see him as a casualty. Some slacker who couldn't hack it in med-school.
I can only imagine what they really think about me.
Who am I?
Am I what I think other people think I am? That is, am I what other people see—a physical image—or is there a hidden beauty and charm that may not have surfaced?
Am I the slight lines on my face, which Ricky says give me character, but which I think make me look old?
Am I my teeth? My lips?
Am I the cross-shaped scar on my head from where they poked and prodded my brain, deciding whether or not there was enough neuronal activity left of me to save?
I go to the bathroom with all of these questions floating around me. I have the overwhelming urge to wash my hands and face. I have several small aromatherapy soap bars.
The red one, it smells like berries, and claims to make you feel vibrant. There is a scar on my left hand, just behind my second knuckle. No clue how it got there. I could have fallen through a plate-glass window, or been partially nailed to a cross by religious psychopaths.
I rinse the pink foam off of my hands. Hands of a stranger I don't even know. Next, I pick up the tan-colored bar. Vanilla bean scented. It smells so good I'm half tempted to take a bite out of it. Vanilla bean is supposed to, and I'm reading here, “ . . . soothe the savage beast.”
So, I guess they wash gorillas and polar bears with the stuff.
I lather up my hands and cover my face in soothing bubbles. Mixing these two soaps, trying to get the best parts of the berry and Vanilla bean, it's about the closest to gay I'll ever get. And still, I hope nobody ever catches me doing it. I'm pretty certain that combining aromatherapy soaps gets you on a first-class flight to kooky town.
I wash the Vanilla bean suds off of my face and look at myself in the mirror. I try to study the characteristics of my face the way other people do. Am I my light brownish-green eyes? Am I my average shaped nose? Am I my short brown hair, sprigs of grey migrating here and there? Am I the puffy bags underneath my eyes?
Am I the dead girl standing behind me in the mirror?
I blink a couple of times to see if my mind is getting squirrelly, or if she's actually there, behind me. I take a deep breath, my eyes closed, and slowly open just my right eye. She's gone. But not.
She's still on my mind. This girl, she tugs at me emotionally, and I have no explanation for this.
I dried my face and set the bars of soap in their correct and symmetrical locations around the rim of green marbleized sink. In the back of my thoughts, I hear those haunting words, not yet.
Not yet . . . what?
I had been reading the Book of Sighs on and off all day, writing down everything I could remember. Each time the spooks came around to watch the translator—me—at work. And each time my apartment bent and melted into the place between dogs and wolves. Things vibrated, furniture jiggled; and squiggles, dots, and dashes turned into English. Maybe I was a linguistics expert in my before-life?
A translator, perhaps.
Heck, I might have been a college professor.
Looking at my clean, vibrant, soothed face, I can kind of see an esteemed colleague. A professor emeritus. A Dean Jack, even. With all sorts of initials after my name. I raise my chin a bit, studying my profile. Quite scholarly, if I do say so myself.
“Good day, old chap,” I say in Rupert's voice. “Jolly good. Bloody liberals will be the death of the Queen. Mr. Watson, I presume. Rubbish!” And slowly I lower my chin. I'm a retard.
I left the bathroom, turned to my right and stopped dead in my tracks.
She's right in front of me. I try the eye closing thing, again, but she's not going anywhere. When I get past the sheer terror of it all, I notice she's looking at me like somebody who knows me. Her face is softened. Somber.
But—and I'm not sure about this—it's like she's pleased to see me. Like some part of her horrible suffering is eased, if only for a tiny fraction of a millisecond. This might also be transference on my part. Could be that I'm so desperate for connections that I'm forcing them on ghosts and ghouls. How sad is that.
This girl—once you get past the dead grey tone of her skin, and the wet-black shoulder-length hair—she's attractive. I know that makes me a complete sicko, but I'm serious. This girl must have been quite beautiful when she was alive.
Hello, Thorazine drip.
Nice to meet you Mr. straitjacket.
And is that your friend, electro-shock therapy? Oh, I'm sure we'll all get acquainted shortly.
She blinks her wide, curious eyes and slowly starts glancing from side to side, like somebody might be coming. Her eyes appear anxious and afraid, and she puts her thin finger to her lips and whispers, “Shhhhhhh . . . ”
And then I hear this blood-curdling scream that sounds like starving monsters, and children, and trains, and birds all mixed into something truly horrifying. Something is approaching us. She senses it, and so do I . And as this dark force closes in on us she opens her mouth to speak, but doesn't manage to.
She's too scared to speak.
And I'm thinking maybe I should be, too.
I feel more afraid than I have ever been in my entire short life. The scream sounds again, shaking us. The both of us flinch together, at the same moment. And this is shitting-in-your-pants scary!
This dead girl, she doesn't have time to tell me her secrets. And I find myself wanting to protect her. To shelter her from the screaming, but that's impossible . . . because she's
fading.
Because she's gone.
And that scream, it's just an echo in my head, now. The same pounding, hammering noise I've been hearing since I woke-up.
Chapter 22
R.H.D. Memorial Hospital.
Monday morning . . .
“The hospital,” Ricky says as we're walking down a glossy hallway, “ . . . it's like a whole, self-contained city. It could be a country it's so efficient. It has to be self-sustaining, with every possible event accounted for and figured into the design. And it's always under construction. There are whole wings that used to be thriving, that are no longer accessible from the main hospital. They're like ghost towns, now, hidden behind plastic and brick.
“ . . . walled off like they never existed,” he says eerily.
I'm dressed in my OR scrubs, again. This time I even have the slippers, the gloves, and a mask around my neck, just in case we enter a restricted clean area. Ricky thought that we should tour around the hospital looking at people who are in varying levels of sickness and suffering. You know, to see where the spooks congregate; what turns them on.
Ricky's ideas, though zany and off-the-wall at times, usually make perfect sense.
The hospital was the ideal place to study the other side. Where better than a miniature city dedicated in handling the transition from the living to the darkness beyond?
Another reason this experiment was coming just at the right time was that my mind was stuck on this dead girl I kept seeing in my apartment. I wonder if she came with the apartment—someone else with problems like mine—or if she and I had some deeper connection.
Was she my own personal baggage, or remnants of the past somehow stuck in this county-funded living situation? I hope I haven't been dragging her along for years and years. I wonder if I saw her before my life was erased. It's hard enough for a family member to get to know an amnesia sufferer, so I can only imagine how difficult it could be for a ghost!
And I had another question that needed answering: Where did she figure in with the spooks and the gatherers? I had considered giving Ms. Josephine a visit, but she had been quite specific about finishing the book before I returned to see her.
The first stop on our tour was to the chapel, where—no surprise—we didn't see any spook activity. Just a quiet old guy praying for somebody he knew he'd probably never talk to, again.
As we were walking we discussed the possible scenarios that could be playing out. The first possibility is that the dead girl is from the same place as the spooks.
“That's the most likely,” Ricky says as we follow signs to the PICU (Pediatric Intensive Care Unit) and the NICU (Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit). “The dead chick, the spooks . . . they all seem connected. Elements of the same otherworldly fabric.”
As we enter the PICU I see doctors and nurses tending to sick and broken children, and I feel like a jerk just for being healthy around them. This whole hospital environment gives me the creeps, so I can only imagine how utterly frightening it must be to a 6-year-old.
Here, among these children, there are no spooks.
No gatherers.
No dead people staring at me.
I ask Ricky if we're going to the burn unit. I don't know if I have a strong enough stomach for that, but he assures me we can't. The reason for this is that R.H.D. Memorial is only a class III trauma center. Usually, only hospitals with a class II trauma center rating or better will have full burn units.
Right now, he says, we're on our way to Radiation-Oncology.
The cancer unit, I said.
“That's right,” he replies, “ . . . where the lead-lined rooms with x-ray cannons melt away your hair, and teeth, and immune system . . . and sometimes treat cancer.” He whispers, “I don't think you'll see any spooks there, either. Too much hope.”
Ricky has this theory that the different levels of peoples' faith may be a predictor of spook activity. In the cancer ward, people who believe in chemotherapy, those kinds of people are full of desperate hope and unrealistic optimism.
I'm still on the fence on this theory.
But, sure enough, as we walk through the shorter hallways that make up the Radiation-Oncology center, there's not a spook in sight. Not a ghost to be found. At least, not on my frequency. As we walk I consider my second theory.
The girl, I say, she's a ghost from my forgotten past. Somebody I once knew, haunting me for reasons only the cosmos can fathom. The more I see her, the closer I can get to those answers, or to her telling me them.
“So, in this theory,” he says as if we're doing physics equations, “ . . . the ghost of this girl is unrelated to the spooks?” His voice is rather skeptical.
I nod, Yes.
“So . . . if we subscribe to this theory, we assume that, one or the other—the dead chick, or the spooks—might not actually exist? I mean, one of them could be an illusion of your demented mind?”
I hadn't thought about it that way, but he could be right. It's quite possible that I could be hallucinating the girl, and seeing the spooks. Or the reverse. And really, it's a tempting line of thinking, but it also raises too many other questions.
Ms. Josephine said that she knew of the spooks, and of the screamers—that's what I'm calling the things that keep, well . . . screaming their asses off at me. But she—the guru psychic—said she knew of them. She hadn't seen them, but she knew enough to warn me about them.
“The logical step, now, is to determine which group of invisible, supernatural entities have more credibility,” he said as he stopped at a water fountain and leaned over for a sip of water. I heard gulping sounds as I considered his words.
“Spooks,” he continued as he came up for air, “ . . . more frequently seen, ergo, more credibility.”
Todd Steele would probably agree with Ricky on this one. And, reluctantly, so do I.
“So you could still have a brain tumor,” he said optimistically, knowing that I had so wanted this explanation to sum up all of the things I was seeing.
Thanks, I tell him. But he's right. There would seem to be overwhelming evidence of some mental pathology on my part. At least, from an impartial third-party perspective. My theory of brain tumors and decaying grey matter is a recurring theme. And I had hoped for an answer like this. Something rational.
Me, I'd rather have a reasonable answer that kills me, than something uber-natural that I can't wrap my mind around. Call me old fashioned. Or new-fashioned, I'm not exactly sure which.
But then I remind him about all the progress we've made with the Book of Sighs, lately. And we agree that, though a convenient fit, the old nutbag-crazy boat just won't float. As unhappy as it makes me admit this, I don't think I'm loco.
At least, not yet.
This whole ordeal may eventually push me right over the edge of sanity.
As we walk past an open room I stop in my tracks holding my arm up. But it's a false alarm. What I thought was a spook turned out to be a Pastor's jacket, thrown over a chair while he counsels a sick woman. How's that for irony.
I remark to Ricky about how quiet this hospital is, and I'm not just talking about spook activity. For a house of death, it's halls and rooms seem calm and tranquil.
He explains that this particular facility is more or less a local hospital that services the communities of Farmer's Branch, and Carrollton—suburbs of Dallas county.
“People who are really messed-up, they get CareFlighted to Parkland, where just the Emergency Department is nearly as big as this entire hospital.”
He says that if you scrape your knee, you go to R.H.D. If you have an ax sticking out of your head, you mosey on over to Parkland. And with something as minor as an ax wound, you'll have to wait in line for a couple of hours.
As we make our way through the SNU (Skilled Nursing Unit), Ricky explains, “This is where the hospital makes the lion's share of its money. People here can't live in nursing homes because they're too reliant on medical attention. Really, they cannot leave the hospital at all.”<
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While he gives me the ins and outs of the SNU, I wonder. I wonder what it would be like to constantly watch people die. If I was a doctor, I don't think that I could deal with the knowledge that hundreds of people's lives were hanging on my decisions. If I have a bad day at work, and I make some rash decisions . . . people die. If I stay up late one night—watching House or ER, or whatever it is doctors watch—and I neglect one, tiny, little thing . . . people die. Doctors can't have a bad day.
The doctors and nurses and specialists that wield this power, I wonder if they think about it that much? Or does it eventually loose it's gravity. Are they so used to seeing death that they get emotionally vaccinated against it? Numb and indifferent. Desensitized to the passing of life that unfolds in front of them on a daily basis.
The absence of culpability.
The transition of life from color to black-n-white.
Death Lite. Same great death, half the emotional calories!
Ricky says we should head on over to the ED (Emergency Department), referred to commonly as the ER. “Let's cut to the chase!”
And then we hear, “Dr. Blue to CCU. Dr. Blue to CCU,” beam over the intercom in a pleasant female voice.
“Somebody's coding,” Ricky said quietly. “Dr. Blue is the signal for the Code team to gather.”
On our way we come to a large elevator—big enough for a college football team—I feel this little ping in my chest and then the elevator light blinks several times as the massive steel doors slide apart. Two nurses back quickly out of the elevator, clearing a path for the gurney, and they behave as if like they don't have a lot of time.
As they grabbed onto the hand rails that surrounded the rolling death bed, two spooks scurried out into the hall jumping up and down like they're on crystal-meth. And they're looking up trying to catch a peek at whoever is on the bed.
See Jack Die (Part 1 in the Paranormal Series) (See Jack Die Series) Page 11