Part 2
--Part the 2nd--
It gets said often when speaking generally of anything but specifically departing physical existence in this world "they say… "
They say you see a light. They say you'll be free. They say you'll see your loved ones.
Maybe you run out of film and just don't remember anything. This isn't a meta make-you-ponder-existence story, but I'd submit to you that wondering what happens is probably a better question than the ones you normally ask.
Call that epidural anesthetic transformation, teleportation, consciousness, the red pill, call it what you want to; I was free; able to go where I wanted and to appear when and wherever I wanted. I was free to fly the pale blue skies no longer bound to the boring modes of transit that come when you’re confined to a corpse. I hovered above the surgeon and took in the view from above the OR.
Sterile surgical sheets. Tubes transmitting telemetry. Wires jutting from intercostals, guts splayed out of a body-width Mercedes-Benz Incision, busy gloved hands in a flurry of activity.
1015am.
“That’s dope.” I thought to myself. But I was bored of watching my body down below me. It always took me where I wanted to go and I have a deep reverence for it but I didn’t see a point in sticking around for the show. Wasn't interested in if I lived or died; in the moment I could do whatever I wanted, and I wanted to live my story.
I decided quickly to spend my temporary abilities and time looking for that golden door that I had first caught a glimpse of years ago; the glinting hue had become a color I'd searched for since. I wanted to study it, to decode it, to unlock it, and to see what was behind the ornate outer markings. Knowing that at worst, the space behind the door was nothing special and that, at best, it would be an absolutely epic journey and I'd be a fool if I didn't exhaust every option in an attempt to find out what was hiding beyond the threshold. I've always been a sucker for a good chase.
{Sidebar: Truth be told I'd actually been inside the door once, a year or so before all of this. Maybe it was broken, maybe it was good timing and good luck, maybe it was just my time. Maybe it was sent from up above. maybe it was a glitch…but I was inside. I had been content with a slow burn; to slowly study the locks, search for clues, and take my time to learn about what this whole thing was before making an attempt to get in but in a conspiring moment of fortune the door opened itself and asked me inside. The room beyond the entry was ample in size, uninspiring, and diametrically opposed to the shimmering adornment of the entry itself. It was adequate but underwhelming. After looking around, I left but I spent the days after convincing myself there had to be more; treasure hidden beneath the floor, bags of raw diamonds stashed in the walls. Fulfillment. Contentment. I knew in my own mind that this was my room of requirement (that's a Harry Potter reference) and I had to get back in.}
With my mind made up on my mission,I hovered at the apex of the ceiling as the operating room softened to a gray foggy haze, the sterile, misty atmosphere evaporated and everything faded to a white nothingness.
An exquisitely orange and cerulean evening sky conjured itself from the temporary nothingness and I flew through the cotton-candy blue undetectable to anyone or anything.The sinking sun burst its last dying dreams of light beams over the landscape like a firehose spraying amber on everything it touched. The most beautiful warm tones draped the lush summer landscape as I descended downwards in search of the golden door and the secrets hidden beyond the hinges.
Beneath me gently rolling hills of blue stem and buffalo grass populated the pastures that unfurled between the clear creeks that darted in and out of old growth pine forests. I landed in a horse field beneath the dusky azure sky and used the white pickets radiating from a rust red barn to guide me to its entrance. The barn was large, red, smelled like grain and sweat and horse and heat. Galvanized standing seam metal roof. Cupola. Windvane. Your quintessential barn looking barn. Red dun, dapple gray, bay roan and tobiano horses ambled in the thick green pasture, wandering aimlessly and disinterested in how out of place I was as I traversed from their field to their barn to the edge of the woods searching for clues of something…anything.
They say when you lose something- start your search at the last place you remember seeing it.
Everything felt wrong though. It wasn't the right place or right time. It wasn't right.
A noise from the shadows of the thick woods nearby drew my attention. Branches moved and cracked. The mental calculus was immediate - A Leviathan of the shadow black ocean behind the fringe forest…an enemy. Maybe death itself, come to claim me and take me back…
From a small opening in the underbrush a 2ft tall portly brown and white pygmy goat cantered over to me. His name was Duck. I knew that because he had a cartoony sign around his meaty neck that said "Duck."
"You're early." He told me.
I stared blankly trying to compute what was happening because even though flying and teleporting wherever was apparently possible, a talking spirit guide goat wasn't on the fever dream bingo card and yet here we were… beady eyed, bearded goat staring at my dumbfounded, mouth breathing, eyes glazed over, drug dreaming self.
"The golden door is not here presently." He told me.
Lingering in the confusion and lack of a further plan, I pet his round belly with enthusiasm as little clouds of dust radiated from his coarse fur with each pat. I fist bumped his head and he trotted off to eat some sweet gum leaves and I set off to look for the golden door, because I determined it best to not trust talking goats. Besides, he said it wasn't here presently… not that it didn't exist…maybe this animal was a trickster.
Since I could go wherever I wanted and drop into places that I had completely fabricated, I went skyward to get a 10,000 foot view of my situation.
The sun still hovered in the sky casting the same golden glow. Shadows got neither longer nor shorter and the warm tones cascading over the land never changed their timbre.
The door existed elsewhere. It had to. Like a rapidfire slideshow I searched all the places I thought it might be. I went through them in a blur, scanning diligently at each;
An October balloon-filled sky in Albuquerque.
A sea of spring time bluebonnets in White Hall Tx.
The new moon night sky above the Chisos Mtns.
Rusting birch and sugar maples on the Maine coast.
On a horseback ride along Cypress Creek.
The white sugar sands of Pensacola.
In the geothermal springs of Thermopolis WY.
The Sea Caves around San Diego.
I looked under the lights of the Houston Rodeo, between the red bark of the Sequoias, along the limestone cliffs off the coast of Mallorca. I searched in a bottle of Texas red wine, hunted through the allies of Cartagena, peaked in the Strasbourg Cathedral, and wandered the Council Bluffs.
There was no door in the black hills of South Dakota. Excessive though doorless beauty in Kananaskis. Nothing to report in the Montana Rockies and only the loudest sea of loneliness on the streets between the spires of New York City.
Crunching a pine cone on the snow glazed rim of the Valles Caldera I stopped to reconcile that this may be one of the very rare times in life that I was all the way wrong. I'm no stranger to mistakes or messing up, but I rarely get it totally utterly completely wholly wrong.
Maybe Duck meant that the golden door never existed, but that defied all logic and reason. It was rare, I was there, I saw it. I lived it. It was real. It existed. I remembered it all too well.
But then again maybe I dreamt it up. I started wondering if maybe I saw something in a mirage. Maybe I was chasing the ghost of a good thing. I suppose these things can happen when you meld real life with anesthesia and lucid dreams. Maybe I was wasting my time.
At a loss, I leaned on a thick deep red Ponderosa pine and stared off at a herd of brown elk in the distance. My size 12 Altra Lone Peak 5 shoe crunched another giant pinecone as I felt a horn stab to the thigh.
Duck.
“What am I doing, miniature devil horse? What am I looking for? Why am I here? Why not just call it off? Lay where I am and wait for the vultures…”
“Go back to the beginning.”
Dumb goat…All the places I could go and this figment…this metaphor…this ungulate wanted me to go back to an operating room. I was running out of options and had no real direction though so I thought it would be worthwhile to heed the livestock this time.
I popped back in to see myself still on the table, dissection in progress. An assistant dug around my warm squishy organs while the attending surgeon wrote some notes that I glanced down at-
“…took down the triangular ligament
with a combination of cautery and LigaSure, dissected back to
the inferior vena cava and encircled the left hepatic vein,
dissected that out and kept it encircled with a vessel loop.
then encircled the portal with a blue vessel loop as well to
set ourselves up for a Pringle maneuver if needed.
Took down the falciform down to the ligamentous attachments down to
the hepatic hilum, dissected within the hepatic hilum. I then
cautiously dissected out and skeletonized out the left hepatic
artery going up to the left hepatic parenchyma”
If the surgeon was trying to impress me with medical vernacular and multi syllable words- it worked.
“I was able to encircle the remainder of that left
hepatic lobe with its branch of left hepatic vein with an
umbilical tape, with the hanging maneuver, then took a Covidien
tan load stapler and transected across the remainder of the
hepatic parenchyma as well as intrahepatic left hepatic vein…”
As I began to find the state of affairs in the OR boring, I started to ascend back to better places but noticed at the last moment someone was sitting on the table with me, short legs in cut off jean shorts dangling nonchalantly off the stainless table. An apparition I surmised. I caught a fleeting glimpse of whiskey brown eyes and a gold hoop earring and then it was all gone.
Back in the snow dusted high country I kicked the ice clusters and pine needles around me and yelled for the goat. The clip clop of little hooves heralded the coming of my guide. I looked at Duck and threw my hands in the air as if to ask it “WTF was that for?”
“Some people are alive but walking through this world dead. And some people are dead who would love to be alive. Live for the ghosts.”
No idea what it meant, but it was profound for a four legged, trash eating bag of fur
I was no less lost though, meandering through my own wildest dreams and yet somehow unable to find the one thing I set out to look for all while my meat-mecha suit was in a TBD state above a cold stainless table and under cold stainless scalpels.
