Part 3
Part 3 (View the album and look at the most recent pictures for the other parts if you want.)
They say “seek and you will find."
Maybe they are wrong.
Maybe they are idiots…
Maybe they have never set off on a lofty search for a thing that might only exist in the mind.
I stared blankly into the snow glazed caldera of an extinct volcano and I saw only the wind; certainly not what I was seeking.
Behind the 1000 yard stare in my left periphery was a hazy diorama of the farm and forest from where I had started this journey.
Clearly before me in my center field of vision was an immense snow covered valley that was once a lake of lava.
In my right field of view: surgeons and scalpels and sterilized stainless steel tools doing a ballroom dance around my body.
Duck saddled back up beside me.
“If you're stuck, go anywhere but nowhere. Just keep going.”
Feet firmly planted, I turned my head to stare sarcastically at the goat, very obviously not mobilizing one inch or intending to for the foreseeable future.
“The beginning. I said go to the beginning…” the goat explained as he whipped up a little hologram movie scene for me to watch. My own life…years and years in the past.
In his miniature scene a younger version of me was positioned 2nd in a 2 person expedition into the dark recesses of the world’s longest slot canyon.
Stoic and ambivalent to my presence the red sandstone draped the landscape from canyon to spire.
“This is where you got sick." Duck said.
I watched as my young hologram self fought at a sloth-like pace to move forward. Finally I saw myself scratch and claw through the sandstone and silt to emerge at the other end of the canyon. Blue skies. Flat land. But at what cost?
I knew exactly what the goat was showing me and what he meant. My memory ran back to that place, flashes of the battles rushing to me in a blur. On the front lines, yet still ignored for years.
The time warp was a tempest in my head. I vividly recalled the severe and constant back and forth which seemed like the infrastructure for progress but turned out to be a razor sharp whipsaw ripping through the thoughts, memories, and emotions that hold a person together until finally a cold jagged steel tooth rips through the last thread of fate that’s holding everything together, the freshly unbound matter that makes us who we are spilling like an oil slick to the lowest possible point while the pigment of well perfused skin gives way to shades of necrotic gray.
They say “grown men don't cry." (excepting Tim McGraw).
Internalize it. Package it. Throw all the stress, cortisol, and panic into the destitute neighborhoods of the mind where there are no street lights at night and the doors are made of weathered, delaminating plywood to keep out any prying eyes even though the windows have long since been busted out with bricks letting insects and varmints freely pass through and take up residence…Trash pandas and tree rats rummaging through the shards of broken dreams feasting on the rotting remnants. Let the streets of that place be the road to ruin itself. Never visit it again.
You know, they also say if you keep all that stuff in it’ll kill you…
The vermilion dust devil of canyon country that Duck was projecting before me morphed before my eyes into a menagerie of skyscrapers. I saw myself overlooking cement spires of a densely overdeveloped downtown from the 13th floor of a hotel room. The memories flooded back. The smiley face someone had drawn on the bathroom mirror that only showed up in the steam from a hot shower. The dead silence in a city of noise. The twinkle of metropolitan lights. The insurmountable mile between McCue road and me. The ghost in the room.
At last that scene evaporated in front of me, and how fitting to have my field of view again filled with the rim of a dormant volcano in shared silence with a goat as flakes of snow danced in pretty patterns as if guided by a benevolent witch’s hand; spirals and spheres of frozen water crystals dancing through the air like dragonflies watching me in silence.
(In the surgical world timeline, an iPhone lit up somewhere. New email. The letter... 1055am)
“So what now?” I asked. I felt like the goat-guide rule book was similar to the genie-in-a-bottle one where you get 3 wishes or limited questions so I tried to pick my spots.
“Make it be for something.
Make it mean something.
Make a difference.”
Farm and forest to my left. Pumps and machines blood and guts to my right.
Two roads diverged in a wood, not a golden door to be had.
“Sometimes the things you’re looking for don’t want to be found. You can not force good timing, not even in dreams.”
I stared at the vast snow covered crater in front of us. If the door wanted to show up and open, it would. It would find me. It had not, and I fully acquiesced to the premonition that I should listen to the living lawnmower and keep moving in the brume. I knew he was right somehow and he seemed to stick by me and be there when I needed him..
“Was it even real?” I asked him in a frustrated, defeated tone, knowing he’d understand the intricacies behind the question; Knowing I really meant-
“Did it ever even happen or is it a memory I made up? Am I chasing an Idea that never existed, or did I actually touch the door, feel the smoothness of the handle, and experience the space inside of its walls? Did I have it all in my hands or was it a dream? What am I even supposed to be doing here in THIS dream? IS this a dream?”
His answer was predictably useless and avoidant, but somehow wise-sounding as well:
"Fight until you can't fight anymore. Lie down. Bleed awhile. Get up. Fight some more."
Duck cantered away to the forest.
I laid on the cold hard ground and contemplated options- If the golden door didn't exist why search? Why not go back to the recovery room in the hospital?
I glanced to my right periphery where the hospital scene lingered ever presently but unobtrusively.
The doctor hunched over a desk making notes on a laptop.
“...I took a new fresh Tisseel and completely covered my left hepatic lobe transection bed with Tisseel. I then mobilized that falciform ligament, keeping its pedicle blood supply from the hepatic hilum and I tunneled that over my left hepatic lobe transection site for coverage…”
In the monochrome operating room I spotted that phantasm sitting on the table by my head. Her head turned towards me ever so slightly and I felt a flash of screaming color in the black and white world. I had hitherto, in the real world or any of the fake ones dreamed into existence, never seen brown eyes iridesce, like alpenglow irradiating the bark of a Sequoia tree, or unbridled evening beams scattering through a Glencairn glass filled with Texas bourbon. Friendly, reassuring eyes.
Feeling as though I was safe in that operating room, I got up off of the snow, closed my eyes, and darted over to the deep blue skies and emerald fields of grass that undulated harmoniously in the scene to my left. Almost instantaneously I was back where I started and more lost than I was when I showed up.
I cared little about the golden door. The past scenes that Duck showed me hung in the air- all echoes and shadows. I lost my taste for the fight.
Fenced in by white pickets, standing in a sea of gently waving verdant green grasses, red barn in the distance, sun spilling its desperate late stage evening rays of light, Duck came running to greet me in the horse pasture.
“These horses are going to get mad at you being in their pasture." I joked with him.
"I'm one of them because I walk among them.”
"You're no horse, goat.”
“My heart is like a stallion.” He insisted.
“They love it more when it’s broken?” I asked.
He ignored me. "In the right light my shadow is as big as theirs.”
And indeed the shadows were long and the light source seemed lower than it had been when I first visited this place. Duck and I walked aimlessly in the slanting rays of misty twilight.
“Can I just stay here? You know, lie down and bleed a while, right?"
"You could, but you'd miss the party.” He flicked a horn as if to motion at the horizon before us.
Far ahead I saw a peculiar movement in a land that I thought was devoid of humans. A faint flash of life hovered like a mirage- It was a girl in a green dress walking towards a wall of doors. I cocked my head and felt a sensation that they were a stranger I knew everything about. The towering figure sank into the shadows behind the industrial metal doorframe which was bathed in the tangerine glow of a sky aflame with an intricate tapestry of rose and ember.
From our great distance and through squinty eyes, it almost looked as if the door was golden.
