|
|
(back to previous page)
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.
(continued on the next page)
If you’re enjoying this excerpt and you’d like to sample other books, join our Online Book Clubs.
|
|
|
