See Jack Die (Part 1 in the Paranormal Series) (See Jack Die Series)

by Nicholas Black

  I realize that I'm not really arguing with him, anymore. I'm arguing with myself. I'm the one who needs a reality check. Edward, he's just helping a bunch of people who need his words to make it. Because life is basically cruel and unforgiving.

  He calls out from behind me, “I'm sorry if you did not receive my—”

  I spin on my heel, “It's not you, Edward. You're a good man. It's me. I'm the virus. “But,” I say, just for the record, “ . . . I'd start telling these people to leave a light on.”

  And I turn and go before the spooks, that are sitting just outside this old lady's Suburban, see me.

  I have a physical tomorrow, and after that I think I need to speak with Ms. Josephine.

  On my way back to my apartment I see that same Honda Accord—with the guy that flipped me off earlier—and it's crashed into a ditch beside the road. Paramedics are slowly pulling him out of the car, trying to figure out if he had a heart attack and then crashed, or the other way around. I hope I didn't cause that.

  I sense that I haven't got much time left.

  Chapter 56

  R.H.D. Memorial.

  Physical Exam, Monday morning . . .

  In the last two hours I have had many invasive procedures performed on me. I've had needles jabbed into my arms. Lights shined in my eyes. Probes in my ears. And fingers up my . . . never mind. Point is, I feel medically violated.

  I picture myself on an episode of CSI, curled-up in the fetal position, explaining how the bad man touched me.

  Right at this very moment, I am naked under a tissue paper thin hospital gown with the same crappy little designs you'd find on cheap kitchen ware—something between yodas and bacterium. This gown, it ties impossibly in the back, where no human can reach, so there's more than enough space for anyone to stare at my nakedness.

  I'm sitting on butcher paper waiting for another doctor to ask me a battery of questions that I can't possibly answer. And in walks a doctor with enough white hair to be in a George Washington look-alike contest.

  “Hello, there. Let's see,” he glances down at his clipboard. “Gonna ask you a few questions. Do you have a history of allergic reactions to . . . prescription medicines?”

  I don't know.

  He nods and skips to the next question. “Have you ever been treated for a sexually transmitted disease?”

  I sure hope so . . . but I don't know.

  “History of heart complications?”

  Don't remember.

  “What do you remember about your medical history?” he says, looking up from the clipboard.

  Nothing, I told him. I'm barely five-months old.

  “Oh,” he said, a look of recognition in his eyes, “ . . . you're that guy, with the localized bilateral lesions of the limbic system, notably in the hippocampus and medial side of the temporal lobe . . . ”

  Huh?

  “The amnesia guy. You're the guy who lost all his marbles . . . so to speak.”

  Yeah. That's me. Funny amnesia guy.

  “Have you been experiencing any thoughts about harming yourself or others, or of committing suicide?”

  Is that a trick question?

  “What?” he said with more than a hint of alarm on his face.

  Just kidding. No. No thoughts of hurting myself, or taking my own life.

  “Okay, then,” the doctor says as he gets to mark one box out of a hundred on his printed checklist. “Now we're getting somewhere.”

  He tells me they're going to run an ECG (electrocardiogram) to check out my heart. An EEG (electroencephalogram) to look in my brain for signs of epilepsy, brain tumors, and sleep disorders. MRI (Magnetic resonance image) to look for any abnormalities of my spine, any signs of early-stage cancer, or cerebral edema—which is swelling in my brain.

  “None of these will tell us if you're suffering from psychiatric illness,” he said, then shrugged. “So we'll let your friends in Neurology determine that.” And the way he says it, I can tell he's skeptical of the Neurology Department. They're probably like the dentists of the medical field, looked down upon like low-level scourge by the other doctors.

  Well, that's a vote of confidence. I tell him that all of those tests sound terribly expensive. And then he leans forward, putting his hand near his face like he's going to tell me a little secret.

  “We're billing the government for all your medical examinations . . .”

  And I'm thinking that there is probably a Russian boxcar full of money that just gets lost in the hospital's bureaucratic shuffle.

  So, I say to him, I guess it's best to test for everything possible . . . on earth.

  “You betcha!”

  “Why,” I ask, “do we need all of those fancy tests, though?” And really, I'm just asking for the fun of it. See, each doctor has a different programmed response to this question, and I like to hear them talk. When smart people explain things to me it makes me feel like I'm a tiny percent more intelligent. And at the pace we're going, I should be performing surgery in the next six months.

  “These tests give us a picture of your body's overall level of health and immune efficiency. When we have all of the results we will have a profound understanding of how you have managed to get past your unfortunate trauma so amazingly. As well as your body's coping mechanisms.”

  Nice one. I'm going to remember that.

  “By the way,” he adds, “ . . . do you have any hallucinations?”

  No, sir, I answer proudly. All the monsters I see are real.

  That elicits the condescending, patronizing doctor's laugh. And with each smileless ha, ha, ha you can almost see the words moron, moron, moron coming out of his mouth.

  “Do bright lights give you headaches, or make you feel nauseous?”

  No. What makes me sick are the faceless creatures that sit on peoples' chests, carving out their souls.

  “Excuse me?”

  No. No headaches.

  Anyway, this goes on for a couple of hours. Doctors come, doctors go. At one point, a cute nurse named, Becky, comments on my higher than normal body temperature. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, with honey-brown eyes. She says that I might be, “ . . . hot-blooded,” and then she giggles.

  I'm not sure if she's hitting on me, humoring the retard, or playing with the circus freak, but I like it. As she's checking me, she touches me just a little longer than normal. She's examining my knees with that small hammer, and then playing with my feet to check for feeling and sensitivity.

  Uh, yeah, there's plenty of that.

  And as she's doing this she looks up at me, “You have a kind face.”

  Thank you.

  “But, you look tired. Really tired,” she adds as she runs a ball point pen along the bottom of my foot.

  That tired look, I say, it's from being so kind all the time.

  She giggles again and stands up, circling the exam table I'm still stuck to. She's wearing the thinest green scrubs, and her body . . . it's exquisitely proportioned.

  This nurse Becky, she smells wonderful—like all kinds of expensive flowers and other girly spices that I'll never understand. And as she makes her way to my side, she puts her hands on my shoulder, looking at the scar on my head. Being naked, with this tiny gown thing on, I am hoping that it's cold enough in this examination room to keep me from showing signs of excitement.

  Nurse Becky, I can feel her warm breath on my neck. And she's standing on her tippy-toes saying, “And you don't remember anything at all?”

  Well, there goes that chubby. The blood that was gathering below my waist is now pumping upward towards my brain as I realize she, too, was just interested in the tragedy that is amnesia guy. I think the nurses and orderlies have a running bet that I'm faking the whole thing. Ricky's gonna make a fortune.

  I kind of feel like the guy in the booth at a circus. Like the Wolfman. Or maybe that chick with gills—the mermaid. Come see Jack, the guy with four arms and lizard scales. Good thing they don't know what's really going on with me. Then I'd r
eally be a freak show.

  So, the hours drag on. About three more nurses come in to study this, or scrape off a piece of that. And finally, a young doctor from the Neurology Department comes in to see me. I've only seen him a few times, but he had that familiar passing-doctor look about him. Like one of the extras on ER.

  “Hey there, Jack. I'm Dr. Salter. We've done every test on the planet, and you can put your clothes back on and go.”

  When do you think I will get the results?

  He looks up, like the answers are written on the ceiling, “Well, we should get the blood results tomorrow sometime. As far as the MRI, that will take a few days, to get the images processed and whatnot. The EEG, the ECG, we'll study those up at our department, but I didn't see anything I was too worried about. You look tired, though.”

  It's from being so kind all the time.

  “Huh?”

  Never mind.

  “I noticed,” he said as he chewed on the end of an ink pen, “that your core temperature is running a fraction high. That's usually the early sign of an infection, or sickness. So pay attention to how you're feeling. Don't sleep with the air-conditioning too high. And eat your vegetables.”

  But, other than that . . . I'm healthy?

  “You're doing really good, Jack.” Then he crossed his arms, “Your head trauma, it was obviously horrible, but some very positive things have come out of it.”

  How so?

  “Well, you were just moments from being dead. Actually, you were dead, on and off several times, for a period of just over an hour. Sixty-seven minutes to be exact . . . ”

  67 minutes? That's the same amount of time Ricky told me I had before I froze to death.

  “ . . . it was definitely a tug-of-war to keep you from the abyss. Alive, dead, alive, dead. But we tried some experimental new procedures, figuring we'd lost you . . . and here you are, alive and well. It's amazing. Miraculous, really.”

  Yeah, I say, but I don't remember anything.

  “That's one way to look at it.”

  I raised my eyebrows at him, waiting for the other way I should be looking at my complete long-term memory loss. So optimistic, these doctors.

  “You get to do something that almost every person on this planet would love to do . . . you get to start over. To begin again. You have a new life, and you can do anything with it you want. You can achieve great things, if you have the desire to.”

  “Could I become an astronaut?” I ask. Of course I'm joking, but he doesn't get it.

  “Well,” he says, his teeth together as his bottom lip recedes a bit, “ . . . probably not an astronaut. But there are a million other things just as noble and lofty.”

  “These procedures you did to keep me alive,” I ask to him carefully, “ . . . would they affect the way I see the world?”

  He explains to me, in a mixture of doctor-speak and layman's terms, that the different emergency procedures that were done, were designed to be utilized in the most dire of circumstances. He mentions something about stem-cells—which I've been reading about in Popular Science and Wired—as well as some electrical neuron stimulation techniques that I have never heard of, and imagine that I never will, again.

  “ . . . if everything continues as we think it will,” he surmised, “you'll be an example for the emergency treatment of near-fatal head and cerebral trauma. You could think of yourself as a pioneer, Jack. You might accidentally usher in a new era in our understanding of the brain.”

  Like a saint? I say.

  He smiles, “Not a bad way to look at it, at all.”

  If it looks like a saint, and acts like a saint, and talks like a saint . . . it just might be.

  I put on my clothes and slip on my shoes before people with needles come back needing more of my insides.

  Chapter 57

  I-75, South.

  Tuesday afternoon . . .

  Ricky and I are dodging cars as we make our way to Deep Ellum to visit with Ms. Josephine. I had spoken to everyone else—Dr. Monica, preacher Edward, a few doctors, and Ricky. And even though they didn't all have the complete story, they got a good enough sense of where I was at in my life to nudge me in one direction or another.

  All of them had differing degrees of the same concept . . . follow your heart, but be careful. The doctors and preacher Edward, they said to err on the side of caution. Ricky and Dr. Monica, they said to head into the fray with reckless abandon. So, I figured I needed some perspective from the only resident expert we had on the world of darkness and shadows.

  “Think Ms. Josephine has any kids?” Ricky says as he weaves in and out between the far left and the center lanes of traffic. Other drivers are squinting, white-knuckled, noticeably flinching as we pass.

  “I've never seen any pictures of her family at the shop,” I tell him. “But then, maybe they're all grown up, with jobs and stuff.” I equate being an adult to holding consistent employment. Ricky tells me that is an antiquated view of the social paradigm. I wonder what he reads.

  “Maybe they've passed away, and she doesn't want to drudge-up bad memories?”

  But she talks to the dead, like . . . all the time.

  Ricky just shrugs to this as he heads for the exit. I see a small German automobile scramble for safety as we come across the lanes towards the exit ramp. My feet are pressing against the floor mats as if there might be a passenger's side brake buried underneath.

  “Fucking imports!” he says as we slow ourselves for the quickly approaching merger with slower vehicles. Insurance companies probably play Russian roulette to see who gets stuck with Ricky's policy.

  Aren't Land Rovers considered imports, too? I ask.

  “This is different.”

  How so?

  He sneers at me as he forces his way into the river of creeping traffic, “Because it's a Land Rover. It's imported by Rolls Royce . . . that means luxury, Jack. Luxury!”

  I ask him how many of those cold and allergy pills he's taken today and his eyes narrow at me. I decide that now is not a good time to ask about such silly things.

  A few red lights later, we are pulling to a stop in front of Ms. Josephine's Shop. Same old spooky little place as ever. We get out, and make our way to the door. Just before we enter, I turn around and take a look at the buildings, in their Earthy non-melted and unbent shapes. All of the subtle colors that I take for granted, they look absolutely brilliant. My own personal photograph of this world.

  The sun, it's not a murky green ball, but a bright orange orb, sitting behind several grey clouds that break-up it's powerful beams into strings of light that shine through the interspersed white clouds like bright white strings from the sky.

  “What are you looking at?”

  I shrug, “All the stuff that we see all the time, but that the Deadsiders would trade their lives for.”

  “Dude,” he says, “ . . . don't wig out on me, now. We're close to greatness, here.”

  I'm not losing my shit, I tell him. I just think we should stop and smell the proverbial roses every now and then.

  He looks at me suspiciously as he removes the key from the ignition, “You've been watching that goddamn Lifetime Channel, haven't you?”

  No! I say, pushing the door open.

  I'm lying, of course.

  Chapter 58

  Ms. Josephine's Shop.

  17 seconds later . . .

  Ms. Josephine already had three chairs set out around the small wooden table of smoking things. She always seems to know what we're up to. No matter how clever and devious we think we are, she's one step ahead of us.

  “'ello, boys,” she says politely, bringing us small cups of something that might or might not be tea.

  “Is this going to make me infertile?” Ricky jokes.

  “'opefully,” Ms. Josephine answers as we head back to our rickety thatched seats.

  We sit, and for a couple of seconds nobody says anything. I sip at the tea-like substance, wondering what she'll say. She looks across the tabl
e at both of us and laughs to herself.

  “What kind of mess are we?” And then she smiles. A big, grand, full-on smile. And I realize that I've never actually seen this side of her. She looks so pleasant and nice that I have a hard time connecting this glowing face with the woman who communes with the dead and chops up live animals to make skin paint.

  Ms. Josephine, I start, I want to know where you stand on all of this.

  “But it ain't my decision, child. Whatever you decide to do, I'll be on your side.”

  I understand, I tell her. And that is a comfort. But I want to know how you feel about all of this. I mean, this is really your field of expertise.

  She put her elbows up on the table, her chin sinking into her hands as she contemplated. “I'm worried about all of dis. I'm concerned dat we don't 'ave all of da facts.”

  This is not what I expected to hear her say. Definitely not what I wanted to hear from her.

  “We have the book, we've read it cover-to-cover,” Ricky said. “Well, he has.”

  She nodded, “I understand dat. But, to me, it feels like somethin' is missin'. I can't put my finger on it. I've been listenin' to the other side da last couple days . . . and da voices is quiet, right now. And dey ain't never been quiet before. Dat bothers me.”

  Yeah, me too. What would put a gag order on the Deadsiders?

  “ . . . but den,” she says, her eyes lighting up, her face softening, “ . . . I know you love dis girl, Kristen.”

  I feel like I have to save her . . . to save all of them. I think this is what I am supposed to do with my life. I try explaining this to them, but I'm sure I butchered it along the way.

  “Well, den,” Ms. Josephine says, “we just need to be sure we've done everythin' possible to ensure you make a safe trip.” She ponders something and then asks me, “Are you absolutely sure dat you 'aven't missed nothin' in dat Book of Sighs? Cause, dat's really all we got to go on.”