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Second Soul by Thomas Sullivan
Published by New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA)
Copyright © Thomas Sullivan 2005

CHAPTER ONE

I am Waterfall Man.

The sketchy accounts I gave the docs about what happened November 10, 2000, were true as far as they went, but this is for me. Even though I'll write it to a stranger. Because that's what I'm becoming.

I remember how the magic started. A road smoking with frost, trees trunks like naked thighs in a steam room, the sky just a rumor of light smothered in oily clouds, and the ditches like dirty moats full of melting snow the color of old soap. It was insane to try to ski the narrow band between the road and the creek. Every time I thought about it, the phrase "seriously dumb" ended the urge. But here was the magic all around me on the heavily wooded slopes outside Sheshebans, Minnesota, and magic makes me feel invincible. So I leaned a little. At the top of the mountain I leaned, recalculating the odds. I never did decide to go. My skis just slipped past the point of no return and gravity did the rest. Coming down, the hiss of acceleration rose like applause.

I guess I knew from the start I wouldn't make it, because I kept pushing off the right ski, feeling for the edge of the road, so that if I wiped out, it would be in the shallowness of the ditch. The baskets on the ends of my poles were punching through into sheer nothing. At the least, I was tearing up the bottoms of a new pair of Fischer cross-country skis, and I didn't care. If it hadn't been the first outing of the season, if I hadn't been intoxicated with the mist and all that crystal magic, I might have cut across the road and leveled off. But what I did was skate blindly into the descent.

Speed focused my field of vision, because trackless skiing through low-slung branches is like a grand slalom where the penalty for missing a gate is decapitation. I lost sight of the road. I lost sight of the creek. As the snow deepened on the lee side of the mountain, I carved my way faster and faster until I seemed to be skiing on light itself. The sound of the waterfall crept up on me too late. By the time I knew where I was headed, there were no more exits. I couldn't wipe out, because boulders were popping up like army helmets out of trenches. If I went down, I would break something. But there was a slim hope that I could skirt whatever lay ahead. And hope is part of the thrill you take to the White Room.

Nanosecond hope bursts over you, then fades. It sprints in your adrenaline, then drowns in your perspiration. And there is that oddly cool moment when you know you've lost control, when the looming tree or the precipice or the glare ice inform you that you have to abandon yourself to fate and faith. I've thought a lot about those odd moments, and I still don't know whether they represent remorse or arrogance. But they measure how close to death you come, and somehow that makes you more alive.

I went over the edge of something into the sanctuary of air. Boulders boiled beneath me. I didn't actually see the water. It was just the filler between the stones, the oily black background that took the place of the snow. My feet pushed as though my skis were levers, searching for a brake. My poles braced like Lilliputian pikes prodding a Gulliver of a mountain. The dance was short. A clatter of graphite and plastic, and a rough pirouette that shattered ice. The applause this time was the water cascading over me. Thinsulate and Gore-Tex, polypropylene and spandex, human flesh–all failed to stop the cold that squeezed me to the core.

My instinct was to scramble forward. I was still breathing, so the waterfall must have been ragged with air, veiling me but not forcing me underwater. That seems important now that I'm struggling to believe I'm really alive. The cold was something else. Those first sharp gulps of air stabbed at a glacier inside me with the ferocity of an ice pick. After that, I was numb. Likewise, the struggle to escape was brief. My left leg was wedged hopelessly in something that seemed to be chewing on it. Call it a maw, because by rights I should still be moldering into that mountain. Mercifully, the leg too went numb.

I was a dead man. Despite what I said about fate and faith and hope, I was a dead man and knew it. Faith has always been my weakness. I don't think I struggled at all after the first few seconds. Whether it was seconds or minutes, time became one more item added to things lost. And eventually in that limbo of lost time and paralyzing cold, a question formed dimly in my brain. Why was I still dying? Why was I still thinking? I didn't believe that this was actually death, that I had crossed over. I could see the world–murkier than before, a grotto of millennia-old boulders and silhouettes, sounds and smells–even with torrents coming down around me.

They tell me there was a bear. I never saw the bear. If it came there for me, it must have been very discreet about it. But I heard the bus whining down the grade, and the bus hit the bear. That's what sent the vehicle hurtling off the road and into the trees. Nineteen of the twenty-two aboard, including the driver, were killed. Unbelievable. Two life-and-death dramas in one hour in one little patch of mountain. That much, at least, was coincidence.

There was no feeling in me at all when I heard the crash. I don't mean just physically; I mean emotionally. A total contrast to what must have been going on in the bus. The passengers would have had time to react. All those people coming back from an outing at Mille Lacs, the icy descent, the curve, then the bear. They would hear brakes squealing and feel the surge; they would know what was happening; and even after they hit the animal and spun out, they would be flung around like screaming rag dolls until the yellow school bus broadsided against two trees and burst into flame. Then the sudden extinction. The nineteen died at the scene. Ironic that so many were perishing in a fiery holocaust while twenty yards away a man was freezing to death in a waterfall.

It has been suggested to me that I could not have seen the molten glow, that my eyes probably weren't working at that point. So why a memory of reds and yellows? Peter Max rainbows throb in my memory. It must have been the bus. The waterfall may have distorted it, but if I did in fact still exist, it was in a taffy-pull twilight where everything looked like a Lava lamp. And there was more. The burning bus isn't what I remember most. What I remember most is a hole in the sky.

I don't know what else to call it. It was an absence of light, and it rushed at me as if it were a figure, as if it had a will. It "did" have a will. It hung there, and I knew that something extremely perceptive swarmed within it. I stared into its silhouette, which kept changing shape–if that wasn't also a refractory trick of the waterfall–and I sensed a malevolent joy pouring out of it. There are moments when you transcend verbal communication, when you know that five senses and a bunch of grunts can't contain the universe. Such was this moment. A coherent presence faced me, and it was absolutely and utterly commanding. My intelligence withered before its depth and intensity. At the same time, I knew it lacked whole dimensions of the human heart. Whatever it was, it had no compassion. It was feral. It had discovered me in my hour of agony, and it was delighted. My bones were cold enough to shatter, but the chill I felt went even beyond that.

Hallucination, you say? My whole life has been a hallucination since that day when my identity as Michael Bowden Carmichael ebbed close to–and maybe beyond–extinction. Maybe Michael Bowden Carmichael is the hallucination. Maybe what I saw was a glimpse of the true universe beyond the regional physics of a small planet around a hospitable star. Maybe the virtues and vices of Local Planet Number One are just vanity and folly when you put them up against the cosmos. Give Bogart and "Casablanca" credit for the metaphor: Worldly destinies don't amount to a hill of beans in the vastness of the universe.

So what did it want, this thing with no eyes and no substance? Why had it been attracted to me? I wondered, and at the same time I knew. I stood on the brink of an eternal night that crackled with furious things–spirits, urges, demiurges. The lightless specter was master of that domain. It radiated a passion for chaos, a joy over death. Nineteen souls were being dramatically extinguished a few yards away; that was why it was there.

But why this feeling of extraordinary discovery over me?

I wasn't dead. If snuffed-out humans are what excited the specter, there was no reason to be exhilarated at finding just one still hanging on. What pierced my dulled awareness, and what still troubles me fifty-one days later, is that the only remarkable thing about me is. that, if I wasn't dead, I wasn't really alive either. I was somewhere in between. And in the last stages of consciousness on November tenth, the coherent hole in the sky moved directly between me and the burning bus. Suddenly the translucent waterfall vitrified completely, and I saw straight through the silhouette as if it were a tunnel filled with stains moving toward me. For one brief moment, the bus of the dead and my suspended body were connected.


CHAPTER TWO

When the final curtain comes down, you lose the audience and the light but not the play. Even if you suffer sudden and massive extinction, you awaken again at some level of awareness. I know you do because of what is out there now. A busload of them. Silhouettes and shadows who have reached the vestibule of my mind and are waiting for me to make a mistake.

They are homing in on the fact that I am lost and isolated. There is no one I can turn to. Writing this is my attempt to reach out. Maybe only to a saner version of myself that existed before, but I'll grab any hand in this storm. Almost any hand.

Who am I kidding?

I don't know how to take a hand. This is a hell of a time to have to learn how to trust.

Everyone calls me Michael to my face here at the hospital, but behind my back they call me Waterfall Man. No one calls me Bowie, which is what I was before November tenth. And the news media can't get beyond the bouncy sound of my full name: "Michael Carmichael is a dead man walking....Michael Carmichael is recovering at Mayo Clinic."

Recovering. Right. As if the fracturing nightmares represent progress. Nightmares like the magic mirror in the bathroom. Or the microhells writhing in the corner of my room that suddenly take on color when I stare into the shadows. I don't think I'm recovering at all. I think the long slide in my life that began before November tenth has detoured through another dimension.

Like I said, when I had friends, they called me Bowie. I'm burning bridges, I guess, so I don't have friends anymore. Some of that happened before the accident, because I was cleaning up my act; some of it is happening now, because I refuse to see anyone or answer the phone. I don't want to hurt the people from my past, but I don't want to be seen like this.

If I look the same in the huge mirror in the bathroom, it's because what's changed is so deep it may never show on the surface. I remember my dad saying he changed suddenly. He just told me one day that he'd lost it. He knew his memory was going, and that he couldn't react the same, couldn't find the precedents and the links that held his life together. And more and more after that he spoke in a different tense. He didn't "want" things anymore; instead he had "wanted" them. He spoke so sadly that I knew he really had changed. His attitude went south, and that dulled his effort to live, and that made him age rapidly. I guess that's what I'm afraid of finding in the bathroom mirror at Mayo: the past tense.

This particular mirror is one of those incredibly clear silvered layers with very thick glass over it that make the world behind you look dimmer and deeper. You'd swear your image was a distinct and separate person. And you'd swear there were eyes glittering out of the gloom behind you. And there was this one time–perfectly explainable, I'm sure, when you consider the condition I was in–but this one time when it got very, very crowded in that glass.

It was maybe the second or third visit I made to the bathroom by myself. I was unsteady on my feet, and the nurse hung around the outer room, telling me to leave the door open a crack.

"Don't you be modest now; I seen everything you got. And you ain't ready to solo yet."

I closed it, because I was ready to solo, and they had to understand that I didn't belong in a hospital. It would have been okay, too, but the light in the mirror immediately began to fade and the air stopped moving. I'm very sensitive to moving air now, and at that moment I felt like someone had stuffed a rag down my throat. I fell forward, planting my hands on the edge of the sink. I "thought" I planted my hands, but it seemed like I was still rocking forward, my face continuing toward the glass. The light went rosy, a deeper red with each thud of my heart, as if my pulse were gushing into the mirror. The image–I can't call it "my" image–began to bunch at the throat and under the eyes and around the mouth. Veins throbbed at its temples. I tried to call out, but all I got was the gurgling of lungs filling with blood.

And then my forehead touched the mirror. In fact it passed through the mirror–passed through and met cool, moving air. My lungs filled with vital, healing oxygen and my vision suddenly cleared. I say it cleared, but what I saw was like broken glass picking up multiple images. I was inside the mirror–inside the image or inside myself–and I saw my face catenated in an endless chain.

If I tell you the aftermath, that the nurse heard the mirror crack and barged in to find me with a gash in my forehead flowing like a bloody cataract, you might logically conclude that what I saw were reflections in the broken shards that rippled from the wall. But the memory is vivid and nonnegotiable, and it wasn't just clone-perfect images–they weren't "exactly" the same. It was me in uncountable different moods and expressions.

What the hell was I looking at?

They sewed me up, but the wound isn't healing. A maintenance man came to replace the mirror, and I watched him take out the pieces of the old one.

"Man, how did you do that?" he wondered aloud. "It's jigsawed like it's been twisted. Must have been a flaw in the glass."

There was no spidering from a simple point of impact. Like he said, jigsawed. I've scrounged paper and pen from one of the orderlies, cheap reading glasses from the hospital pharmacy, and I'm writing this down. There's nothing else to do here. They tell me I'm convalescing great, while I choke down the upheavals.

So now you know why I don't want to see anyone who knew me before. I have to sort this out among strangers whom I can leave safely behind. Once upon a time, before divorce and booze and pills and unemployability and fatherhood interruptus, I liked me. Now I'd sell my soul to get back to being the cliche I was. Make that souls. Maybe I can hold an auction.

When Admissions caught up to me with the registration form a week out of the coma, I told them to put down "no living relatives," which is a triple-decker lie. I have three living relatives. My sister Laura works for a right-wing lobbyist on the left coast; my kids are seven and nine and live in the Twin Cities. I saw all three of them in September at Dad's funeral.

Jessica and Danny were there courtesy of Dolores, my ex, who made no pretense over the fact that she thought I was using the funeral to manipulate the terms of custody. I'm not supposed to love my kids anymore. Dolores whisked them away at the end of the service before we could get reacquainted. She figures the sooner they forget about me, the better. Even though I've been basically clean for eleven months and off probation for six. In her report to the judge, the outreach officer said that I was always in the gym or out on the trails and that I've become "a model for physical rehabilitation." She didn't say much about my psychological state, but you could infer that I was ready to pick up the pieces of my life. Sound body, sound mind. All before the accident, of course.

Dolores practiced extinction on me, but there's no way she can have missed all the news about the accident. I made the papers for a week straight in Minneapolis after the details of my hypothermia were known. "Time" and "Newsweek" had snippets, and NBC's Tom Brokaw tacked on a piece about me at the end of the story about the bus. Peter Jennings skinned my saga down to a couple of lines, as if to say that ABC had seen NBC's feature and deemed it not that important. Listen up, Peter. No one has ever been that far through the long white tunnel and come back before, no one has ever brought consciousness of death back with them, no one has ever pumped warm blood again after having their veins turn to slurry and their heart stop. Stay tuned and maybe I'll give you the scoop when I figure out exactly what else happened to me while I was on the wrong side of the River Styx.

I saw a videotape of the ABC newscast. They wheeled in a TV with a VCR that they use for presurgical orientation and showed it to me. The nurse said someone left the tape because I wouldn't accept any visitors. I finally figured out it was Sam. Sam always tapes the nightly newscast while he closes up his ski and outdoors shop. I guess you could call him my friend, despite what I wrote about
burning bridges. Funny, the farther I get from other people, the closer we get. Sam is half Ojibwa, half Norwegian–Simota Ingmar, if you can believe that. We both know skiing, and we both know silence, and that puts us in the same church if seldom at the same service. He must have left the tape.

There was a helicopter shot of the waterfall, and then another of the hospital where I was lying in a coma. Jennings told about the accident and that I had been cross-country skiing. Mainly he focused on the bus and the fact that it was an unusually early storm that had come out of nowhere. Nowhere. I could have told him where it came from. I've prayed for storms enough times. Winter is what I live for: the white cathedral...tabula rasa. Nature puts on Her holy vestments and wipes away the whole cruddy earth, absolving all sin. The trees go naked before Her, and I write upon the sacred snow with my feet shod in Salomon boots mounted on skinny boards. I punctuate the text with Exel poles, and I leave runes that only a higher power can read. That's how I pour out my confessions. That's how I flash-freeze my miserable, burning soul.

...Well, a little self-hate there. Indulge me, please. I've changed so much in the last year, sometimes I forget I'm not the loser I was. Not that I'm where I want to be yet. For sure I've got to get back into the lives of Jessica and Danny before it's too late, and in order to do that I've got to make some kind of breakthrough with Dolores. She won't even let them come to the phone. I don't think she'd wish me dead. Too much guilt if it came true. But I'm not expecting a get-well card, and she'll flat-out lie to the kids about what happened to me. I figure when I'm sure the courts will grant me parental privileges, I'll just talk to her, lay it on the line and suggest we go about this amicably instead of paying lawyers to throw paper at each other. She gets pretty emotional, but there are times when she does the practical thing too. I've never been able to predict her.

No known case of hypothermia has ever survived with a core temperature as low as mine was. 55.1 degrees. You're supposed to be dead when you drop down to the low eighties. There have been a couple of recoveries whose core temps dropped into the high fifties, but the doctors don't know how I hung on. One of them called it a mammalian reflex. The medics airlifted me off the mountain and jumped me downstate to Mayo, where a team worked on me half the night. They even had a live Net exchange with some experts at Tromso University in Norway. I was clinically dead, circulation zero. My brain was so cold that it essentially didn't need any oxygen, and the doctors used a cardiopulmonary bypass to warm my blood outside my body. I was partially paralyzed and on a ventilator for three weeks, then intensive care for another six.

So of course I'm changed. Even though they can't find anything wrong with me, I've got to be changed psychologically. The shrink–Dr. Anthony P. Weibens–just keeps nodding his head and saying I've been through an incredible trauma and it will heal. Like he deals with people who were clinically dead every day. I don't dare tell him the details of the accident or about things like the mirror. I've fed him a couple of see-through nightmares just to seem cooperative, because if he knew how delusional I am, I'd never get out of here. As it is, if Dolores ever gets a court order to look at my treatment records, I'll be back sitting in the supermarket parking lot, hoping to catch a glimpse of my kids coming out of Cub Foods with her.

Something is wrong, all right, but it's physical. Believe me, I'm not a hypochondriac. By the time I visit a doctor voluntarily, it's a toss-up whether he or the mortician will get my business. Extreme jocks tend to develop a rapport with what's going on inside them, and they know if there's a physical change. When I'm in shape, I'm like that. I take a breath and feel it in my toes.

I was in shape before I lost my kids. Then I fell off the deep end. Divorce wasn't that big a deal, a couple of strangers coming together, then becoming strangers again, but when society steps between you and your natural-born flesh and blood–well, for me it rendered my contract with civilization null and void. No stranger with a gavel was going to hear a few minutes of frantic pleading and then decide that my major role of fatherhood would snuggle right in there between lunch and dinner for a few hours every other weekend.

I couldn't handle it. Self-destructive between visitations, yeah. Jack or Jim from the bottle before noon; prescriptions and aliases off the Web. The first time I didn't bring my kids back from a parental visitation, I got the benefit of the doubt and probation, but the second time was totally unambiguous. Airline tickets in my pocket, alcohol and drugs still in my blood from the in-between days when I was forbidden parental rights, the kids in the backseat. I was two hours away from becoming one of those quasi-kidnappers on a milk carton whose last name happens to match the kidnappees. So that's why Dolores is afraid. They could have put me away solid. They should have put me away solid. But it would've killed me. Some people absolutely cannot live without freedom, and I'm one of them. I think everyone recognized that–even Dolores. So, that was when I understood that the stranger with the gavel was going to get between me and my kids, and I promised not to defy a new court order. I got off with three months' jail time and more probation.

Jail focused me. The only way I was going to have contact with Jessica and Danny was to get clean and in shape again. Not that hard, if you want to know the truth. The hard part is convincing the judicial system that the little aberration they saw was just a blip reaction to what the court did in the first place. So, I got in shape. I've never been in better shape than I was on November tenth. And since I've gotten the rapport with my body back, I know unfailingly when something is wrong inside me.

I try not to stare at the mirror in the bathroom now, and I shave with the door open. This morning I filled the sink with hot water without looking up. I tried to concentrate on the shaving gel, but already I sensed the expansion in the glass. I made myself into Santa Claus before I looked up, but instead of comic relief, the white beard just made the red gash in my forehead look like a bullet hole.

"You're a fraud," I said to the image. Or the image said to me.

We raised our silver-handled Gillettes to our sideburns, observing mirror protocols–my left, his right. A thin mist came between us. Whose breath? Steam began to close in from the corners.

I leaned back. Dangled the razor in the water. Not possible there could be that much steam from just the sink and my breath. It would take a roomful of breathers to make the mirror look like that, like a daguerreotype photo, all grainy and imprecise. The shaving foam blended with the steam, so that all I saw was the gash that won't heal. Ugly. Red. The mark of Cain on my double.

I was getting as fuzzy as the room, but don't tell me the face in the glass was just an obedient doppelganger. I saw the asymmetry. And it wasn't just a mirror anymore; it was a separate and distant universe. On my side I had steam–thin as a waterfall. On the other side it was dust and fire. The festering redness on my forehead was the only connection. Only, in the mirror, it looked like something raging in hellish exile a million parsecs away. A buoy. A beacon in a nether ocean.

The door reverberated as I bumped into it, but I couldn't turn my back on the mirror. Fumbling, I raked the jamb across my shoulder. I don't know, maybe in my terror I was somehow marching in place, but I couldn't seem to leave the bathroom. It was as if the walls were made of distance, and I didn't find myself in the outer room until the steam dissipated and innocence rose up the glass.

A doctor once told me that the reason men sometimes get dizzy when they shave is because the way they move their neck can shut off the blood supply to the brain. That's the rock I've been clinging to all day.


CHAPTER THREE

Finally, a few more sheets of paper. The orderly brought them to shut me up. I keep asking why everyone is acting funny, but he won't say. No one will tell me what happened. They want to know about the IV. Did I put something in the plastic bag? Did I fool with the drip rate? I tell them I didn't, and I get reassuring pats. They think I'm incompetent. Incompetent or not, my hearing is so acute since the accident that I pick up scraps of conversation from the hall.

"He must have had a flashback," one of the nurses said.

The person she was talking to answered: "Either that or he thinks he's Jack Frost. Lucky if he doesn't come down with pneumonia."

I guess they mean about finding me in the shower this morning. As if I were trying to go back to the waterfall. And I guess that means they know less about what happened to me last night than I do. That's what this is really all about. Last night. I didn't have a flashback. The nurses don't know about the wheelchair or the elevator. The things I remember from last night...they were real.

Sometime after I drifted off cold hands jostled me out of bed and forced me into a wheelchair. My eyes weren't focusing and the walls were spinning, and whoever was pushing me stayed out of sight. It wasn't until we got to the service elevator at the far end of the hall that I understood: If there was anything at all behind me, it wasn't an orderly or a nurse.

The door rolled open with a hollow boom–hollow, I remember that. It should have been muffled. Because the inside of the elevator was crammed with bluish figures. The wheelchair glided toward them, and I braced for collision. But it was like becoming part of an X-ray. There was no contact at all. The blue began to fade, and I realized there were no lights on in the car. The door was sliding shut. An overpowering dread iced the pit of my stomach. I did not want to be in the dark with those filmy presences. I struggled to rise and stop the steel door, but the nurses were right; there must have been something in my IV. Liquid cobwebs fed my blood. I fell back in the chair, and the little steel car got darker than the inside of a crocodile's stomach.

And then the whispering began. Different cadences, different registers, but each one invasive and intimate. A chain of pleas and threats came at me that were trumped suddenly by a child's shrill denial: "I am 'not' dead!" Then the voices rushed together and nausea overwhelmed me, because the elevator was falling, and it wouldn't stop, an endless descent, faster and faster, that must have beat Jules Verne silly for penetrating the Earth's core. The crescendo of whispers rose as if acceleration were squeezing the pitch. And the mounting g-forces seemed to separate my body from my mind. I must have passed out. Tell me it was the compression in a dream, and I'll believe you, because the next thing I remember was coming to with a gentle nudge when the elevator bottomed out.

I expected that we had arrived at the gates of hell, but the door slid open and there was a great chill. The chill sharpened my perspective, and I saw that all the whirl and the blur of descending in the elevator had ended in some kind of freezer. It must have been a lab. A forensic or a research lab, judging by the horrors that the bluish figures showed me in the faint light. Vats of cadavers hung like sport jackets in ordinal rows. Discreet items of human anatomy floated inside glass decanters. The ensemble of silhouettes who came off the elevator with me flitted in an overwrought dance around the sinks and tables, their whispers oscillating like the gain on a badly tuned radio.

I don't know what they were trying to show me. Death per se? Hell's morgue? Were they the spirits of the things there in the formaldehyde?

Whatever was coursing through my veins from the IV must have taken majority control then, because my neck began to feel like pasta and my head lolled to one side. The next thing I remember is the nurse finding me in the ice cold shower back in my room. I was sitting on the tile floor in the soaked hospital gown. They said I wasn't even shivering.

It's not fair that I'm being held to blame, that they think I'm acting out delusions of a troubled mental state. I didn't seek this out. The drama came to my bedside. I want out of here, and this has set me back. The nurses are checking on me every fifteen minutes.

Weibens, the shrink, is trying to be casual about it, but I can see he's just about wetting himself with excitement. Here is two plus two. Here is something he can add up without any help from me.

"..and yet 'you' were in that cold shower," he said when I gave him a blank look and a shrug. "Ice-cold...with your hospital gown on."

"The label said 'wash in cold water only.'"

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