An Informed Death

The moon hugged the horizon opposite the setting sun. Streaks of orange and red scattered among the patchwork clouds that drifted in a lazy arc across the sky. The first snow of winter blanketed Denver in a thin layer, glistening under the radiant sunset.

My boots crunched with each step, compressing watery snow into ice. My shift at the hospital had ended, and I dragged my exhausted body toward the overflow parking almost a mile down the road. My breath puffed in a white mist, and the air smelled crisp and clean, a refreshing change from the sterile hospital odor. Being a cardiologist was tough, especially the parts where I had to tell patients they were dying. I had never grown used to that, and despite feeling satisfied with my work, I was always drained after a long shift.

I stopped at the crosswalk, and pressed the button. An eclectic mix of restaurants and shopping centers lined the thoroughfare, and I briefly considered grabbing something to eat before my inevitable post-shift crash, but nothing was appetizing despite my hunger. The smell of cooking food wafted around me, but instead of igniting my appetite, it made me feel mildly nauseous. That was a common stress response for me, and was part of the reason I had never been able to gain the weight my large frame could support.

The crosswalk light turned green, and I had just stepped out into the road when I heard a muffled shout from somewhere ahead. It was late enough that there were no other pedestrians, and most of the businesses were closed, so the sudden cry drew me up short, my senses on high alert. I had participated in karate from a young age, and that training paid off, because when my body went into fight or flight mode, I instinctively chose to fight.

I sprinted toward the direction the sound had come from, and as I drew closer, it grew louder. It was coming from behind an Italian restaurant to my left. My mind raced, and I tried to calm myself with simple thoughts. No one is in danger. A closing employee is out back, smoking and watching a movie on their phone. Or a manager is arguing with a lazy employee. Or…

I turned the corner, and froze. Two men had a young woman pressed against the dumpster, and though their bodies blocked my direct line of sight, I could see her pants laying on the ground at their feet. Her long blonde hair thrashed in the dying sunlight as she shook her head, struggling to get away. The back door to the restaurant was propped open, and several trash bags littered the ground just inside.

I pulled out my phone and started to dial 911, but I realized that there was no chance the police would arrive in time to help that poor woman. I called anyway, and set my phone down on the ground, letting it ring and praying that the employee at the dispatch station would be suspicious enough to send someone out.

I stepped forward carefully, quietly. Even to this day I am not entirely sure why I did not yell out and try to scare the attackers off. My mind had simply entered that one-track mode, where all problems have a solitary solution. I had to help her.

As I drew closer, I saw that her uniform shirt—a red polo with the word “Italia” emblazoned across the chest—had been yanked down. The collar was stretched out, and the buttons had been torn off, exposing the woman’s chest to the cold evening air. She writhed, but one of the men had a hand over her mouth, and was whispering something that I could not hear.

My blood boiled. In the furthest reaches of my logical mind, I knew that I could not fight off two able bodied men on my own, but fury had overridden that quiet reason, and my body acted without my consent.

I darted forward, and aimed a kick at the head of the man closest to me. Both of the attackers were facing away from me, so the strike took the man unaware, and his skull rebounded off the dumpster. He crumpled, then began seizing from the impact, and the analytical part of my brain began diagnosing him even while I aimed my next attack. Severe blunt force trauma to the head, resulting in immediate and violent seizures. Possible cranial bleed.

The second man reacted faster than I anticipated. He grabbed the woman’s shirt, and pulled her off the dumpster, swinging her toward me. I thought he was going to flee, so I reached out and caught the woman before she could fall. She was sobbing, and slumped to the ground. I tried to think of something I could say to comfort her.

I did not get the chance. The man I thought would escape had instead drawn a knife from his back pocket, and twirled it into a front-hand grip. He snarled at me, then charged. I pushed the woman down to get her out of the way, then attempted to disarm the man with a wrist lock , but my hand slipped on his sweaty skin, and instead I found the blade sinking six inches into my belly.

Hot blood ran down my stomach, over my khaki pants, and dripped onto the back of the half naked woman laying at my feet. I looked up from the wound, and swung a wide punch at my attacker, but I could not seem to get any power behind the punch. The man deflected it, and I could see his mind working in overdrive behind his wide eyes, processing what he had just done. He dropped the knife and ran, leaving me with a gaping gut wound, and his friend spasming on the ground, foaming at the mouth.

Darkness encroached around my vision, and I staggered, going to one knee. The adrenaline coursed its way out of my system faster than I expected, and pain blossomed in my groin. Referred pain from intestinal trauma, a voice in my head told me.

The woman was scrambling for her pants, and I wearily considered that she must be embarrassed by her state, but instead of putting them on she fumbled her phone out of her pocket, started dialing, and pressed the cloth to my belly in a vain attempt to stop the bleeding.

“H-hello?” She cried into the receiver, tears streaming down her face. “I-I need an ambulance, and the police. Somebody has been stabbed.”

As I lost consciousness, I thought about what a hero she was. She did not even mention the attempted assault, her only thought in that panicked state was for my well being. And here I thought I was the hero. Foolish.

I awakened briefly in the back of the ambulance. An oxygen mask was strapped around my head, and two EMTs busied themselves with a blood bag. Emergency blood transfusion, I thought. I must be in worse condition than I realized.

I looked around the back of the moving vehicle. I could not hear the sirens blaring, and it took me a moment to realize that I could not hear anything. The pain from before was dulled, but I was certain that I had not been given any painkillers. No, I was dying, and my body was simply shutting down.

Sitting close to the door was the woman I had tried to save. Tears rolled down her cheeks, and her face was flush with fear and frustration. She glanced up at me, and caught my eye, then broke down again, sobbing harder. I must look terrible.

The ambulance stopped moving, and one of the EMTs opened the door. I was tied down on the gurney, and pulled out of the ambulance. The woman shuffled up to the side of the stretcher and grasped my hand, walking alongside me as I was carted into the emergency room—the same emergency room I worked at. I felt her squeeze my hand, and I tried to return the gesture, but black crept into my vision again, and I fell asleep forever.

~~~~~

I woke up some time later. How? I was certain that I had died on that gurney. Certain that the last person I would ever touch was that poor, traumatized woman. Certain that my last view of the world would be the ceiling of the hospital that I had grown to both love, and hate.

The world was hazy, bright, and filled with confusing noises. My eyes came in and out of focus, and I struggled to pick out details of the room around me. Lingering effects of postoperative anesthesia, I thought.

The room I was in was a myriad of browns and grays, not the sterile white I was expecting, though I could not make out where precisely I was. I peered around, and found that my head felt heavy and sluggish. I squinted, and saw that the floor was raw hardwood, the kind you see in really old bars, worn smooth with the shuffling of feet over decades of use. The walls were, in fact, white, though it was the muddy white of lime paint. My heart raced, and I looked up to see thick wooden beams spanning the ceiling, above which hung tightly woven thatching. I did not smell the expected sterile scent, instead the room was strangely musky with undertones of oak and grass and soot.

Where am I? I thought as I continued scanning my surroundings. Candles flickered in several places, held erect by crude wooden bases, and sunlight filtered in through two dirty windows set into opposite walls.

Someone spoke in a language I did not understand, and I felt myself being lifted. An elderly woman, her white hair framing a wrinkled face, cradled me in her arms, tears streaming down her cheeks. She smiled down at me, though there was concern behind her dark blue eyes. She stood, and for the first time I realized she had been sitting in a roughly hewn wooden chair.

Thoughts clamored for space in my mind. What was happening? Where was I? I reasoned that I must be in heaven, or else my body was dying, and this was my brain’s way of keeping me calm as the end came.

The elderly woman handed me to someone I could not see, and I realized with a flash that I must be a baby. It was the only thing that made sense, the only logical explanation for how such a tottering old woman could lift me with ease. Yeah, I am dead. This is a lucid dream, for sure.

The person holding me now bounced me very gently in her arms. Her long blond hair fell in waves down her shoulders, the tips brushing lightly on my forehead. Something wet spattered on my face, and I realized that she too was crying. Her expression was a mask of anguish, though she looked at me like I was the only other person in the world. I idly thought that she was pretty, though she could not be any older than fifteen or sixteen years of age. She whispered to me in calming tones, but I could not understand a word she said. Whatever language she was speaking was not anything European—I had spent three summers traveling across Europe in college, and I was familiar enough with the various languages that I could pick them out, even if I could not actually understand what was being said. Even so, her words flowed with a smooth grace that reminded me of Italian, or maybe Latin.

My gaze wandered again, until it fell upon a fuzzy shape sitting at the end of the bed. It was wrapped in a blanket, unmoving—a baby, its face and lips stained blue from lack of oxygen. The elderly woman sat on her chair, hunched over the end of the bed, one hand resting next to the still form. She was crying just loud enough that I could hear her over the sounds of the other woman’s whispered words. There was a third person in the room, a young man with short brown hair that I had not noticed before. He rested a hand on the elderly woman’s shoulder, stifling back his own tears, and spoke to her in a comforting voice.

The woman who held me—she must be my ‘dream-mother’—had descended into repeating the same short phrase over and over again. She clutched me, rocking back and forth slightly, and her touch was strangely comforting. Love blossomed in my chest, a deep and powerful feeling that spread across my entire body, the kind of love you feel most strongly when you are a young child, clinging to the hem of your mother’s skirt in an unfamiliar place.

Just as I was coming to grips with the idea that this was my dream-mother, the world reeled precariously. My mind grew numb, and I felt like I was having an out of body experience. A pressure brushed against my mind, and I shuddered. Then, it was gone just as quickly as it had come, and I snapped back to reality. What was that?

I squeezed my eyes shut, then tried to speak. Instead of the words my mind had formed, when I opened my mouth I could only wail. I could feel my arms flailing in frustration, my hands clumsily grasping at the air, but I could not control them properly. This lucid dream must be drawing on various pieces of knowledge I acquired throughout my life, I thought. Babies are not supposed to be able to actively control their limbs immediately after birth, and so my mind has constructed a scenario where that exact thing occurs.

My dream-mother hushed me in an all too familiar way, her graceful fingers stroking my thin hair. She whispered to me, her eyes brimming with tears, and for a second I felt the world around me disappear. It was just my dream-mother and me, and that fuzzy feeling of love overtook my senses once more. If this was my brain’s way of calming me down, it worked, because I drifted off to sleep.