Kat Richardson: Greywalker

I'd woken in the hospital a couple of days later feeling so horrible I'd figured I was going to live. If it felt that bad dying, no one would go.

Now weeks had passed, and the aches and pains, the bruises, scrapes, and lacerations were fading, but the bash on the bonce wasn't clearing up so well. The bouts of weirdness after I'd left—some minor problems with my senses still a bit out of whack, some not so minor-had brought me back to the hospital.

Dr. Skelleher was a stranger to me—the only doctor on urgent care duty when I'd come in. He looked barely thirty and in need of coffee. His hair was short and spiky from a lack of style rather than an excess, and the dark bags under his eyes could have passed for fanny packs. His clothes under his white coat were environmentally correct. A narrow leather thong peeked over the back of his collar and disappeared below the placket buttons of his raw-cotton shirt.

The «incidents» ran past my mind's eye like fast-spinning film as I told the doctor about them.

Sometimes things just looked misty and impressionistic—like the reflection in a steamed-up bathroom mirror. At the hospital, I couldn't always tell when people were really in the room. They seemed to float in and out, changing shape and detail. My hearing was just as unpredictable, all buzzings, mutterings, water gurgles, and cotton wool. I'd been told this was normal for concussion patients and would get better. But… some of it had gotten worse.

And sinking through the hospital bed had been unsettling.

I wasn't supposed to get out of bed without a doctor or nurse around. Call me a bad patient: I didn't like peeing in the cup, so I decided to use the toilet like a human. That part of the job hadn't been so bad, though it was no waltz with Fred Astaire. Getting back to the bed was harder.

Coming out of the bathroom, I'd started feeling sick. The lighting in the room had dimmed a bit and the bed seemed much farther away, deep in the steamed-mirror effect. I struggled toward it, chilled and sweaty, feeling sicker by the minute, picking up a whiff of something like autopsies and crime scenes. I plunged through the cold steam as my vision went gray, then smoky, heading for charcoal. The bed was a vague and shimmery pastel block. I reached it with a shin first, grabbed a steel rail, and dragged myself into it. For a moment, I just lay like a stunned fish on the cold, soggy mattress, panting. Then the bed shifted and I fell through.

The lights had brightened and the room snapped back into focus as I fell. A nurse came in just as I hit the floor. She scolded me, of course. Then she called an orderly and had him scoop me up and dump me into my own bed, which was about four feet away.

I'd thought there were three beds in the room, but the nurse said there hadn't been three beds in that room since the remodel in the 1960s.

Then had come the final-straw incident, just the previous morning.

My face in the bathroom mirror was still scary. My left eye was surrounded by a livid bruise that washed up against the bridge of my nose, seeped over my eyebrow, and sagged across my cheekbone to dribble off over the corner of my jaw into a nightmare dog collar of purple and green. My lower lip and ear were both a bit tattered and swollen still. The general bruising and swelling had pulled my face into a grimace at the hospital that was only then collapsing into tie-dyed puffiness. What I could see of my hair from the front was frayed out at the bottom like the ends of an old straw broom. Most of it was still below my shoulders, though.

But I needed to go back to work—had to pay the hospital bills— and I had an appointment coming up, so I decided to submit myself to a day spa—a combination salon and torture chamber—and hope the staff could make me look more like a human and less like Frankenstein's monster after a night on the town.

With my head in a towel, and padding about in a robe and slippers, I'd been deposited in a tiny steam room to "relax and open the pores" for fifteen minutes. I tried to sit still and relax, but my head felt stuffed with humming insects.

I put my hands up to my temples. I tried squeezing my eyes shut and taking long, slow breaths, but a scent of something like smoke made me open them again. The steam around me writhed and coiled into Chinese-dragon clouds framing a misty doorway.

I stared around. I was alone, no one to tell me it was just a trick of the light. The steam closest to me was thin, tingling warmth on my skin. But the stuff around that doorway was dense as smoke and dark, but chill as fear.

A pale spot of light seemed to twinkle from the middle of the doorway, throbbing a bit, growing into a narrow, pulsing column of watery light. My stomach wrenched and a stab of nausea ripped through my guts. The smoky odor had shifted toward ripe corpses and floodwater.

I put out my hand for balance, then jerked it back. I didn't want to touch whatever that squirming cloud-stuff was. I wriggled back on my bench, thumping my head against the wall as an irrational horror crawled over me.

My chest went tight with sudden anxiety, breath thin and metallic in my throat. I must have yelled, "No!"

Light sliced into the steam, chopping into the misty doorway. I jerked my head toward the light source. One of the perky spa employees looked in from the real doorway.

She asked if I was all right.

I gulped and looked around. Just steam—ordinary steam that smelled of clean water and a hint of pine from the benches. No column of beckoning light. No dragon smoke stinking of death.

I'd told her I was fine, had just fallen asleep. But a frisson had rattled down my spine.

I'd been more than ready to leave the room.

I paused to settle myself a bit before I went on. I frowned at the doctor, who only raised his eyebrows and waited.

I started in on the last tale. "I tried to jog this morning, but I couldn't make it past a trot for more than a few seconds. I feel seasick, smell things, hear things… This cloudy vision… I keep seeing eyes, shadows, crazy things…," I added, petering out. "I'm not sleeping well, either. But I have clients to see tomorrow and I need to get back to work. They told me I should be safe to return to work by now, but maybe I'm not as healed as the hospital doctor thought, or maybe the pills are making me hallucinate."

Skelleher scowled. He'd already poked me with needles and sticks, and made the usual gestures with bright lights and cold instruments. "It's not the pills," he announced, "and your physical signs are fine. There's nothing here that makes me want to challenge your original doctor's recommendations—aside from my personal feeling that the least intervention is best. I'm a strong believer in letting the body and the mind do the work as much as possible." He looked at my chart again and got quiet.

After a moment, he glanced up. "Look, I know this is kind of scary stuff. Head trauma is mysterious and unpredictable. The brain is an amazing thing and we learn more about it every day, but we don't know all there is to know. And what we call the mind—it's still pretty wild country. There are a lot of things that traditional Western medicine is a little uncomfortable with, and the whole issue of life and death, the physical and psychological effects of death on the mind— the metaphysical—is still pretty much in the dark."

I was startled by the turn in his conversation. "Excuse me," I said. "Are you saying that I… died?"

He looked at me with a crooked smile. "Nobody said anything to you?"

"No."

He shook his head. "Jeez… no wonder you're confused. There's supposed to be counseling for this sort of thing. I guess they all just forgot about it, what with the police and all. OK, I guess it's a little late to break this gently, so I'll just give you the condensed version. According to your records, you were dead for a little less than two minutes, about the time the Medic One team arrived. They pulled you back, stabilized you, and got you to the hospital. No other incident occurred. This kind of thing happens with head injuries. Some people have a little trouble… adjusting, sometimes, and some people have some pretty strange experiences, but this is getting into that mysterious and creepy unknown territory medicine isn't very good with. There are psychological counseling services for this, if you're interested…"