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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.'"
(This excerpt end on page 20 of the paperback edition.)
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