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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."
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