I noticed the smell of the grass. Fresh, cut the night before and with the dew still on it.
I can recall fragments of the ambulance ride as if it took place in some dim dream. I worried at the impropriety of running the siren so early in the morning.
They’ll wake half the town, I thought.
Another time, I heard one of the white-coated attendants say something about a red blanket. My mind leaped to recall the blanket that lay on my bed when I was a boy almost forty years ago. It was plaid, mostly red with some green in it. Was that what they were talking about?
These bits of awareness came one after another, like fast cuts in a film. There was no sensation of time passing between them.
I was in a hospital room. The operating room, I suppose. I was spread out on a long white table while a masked and green-gowned doctor probed a wound in the left side of my chest. I must have been under anesthetic — there was a mask on my face with a tube connected to it. And I believe my eyes were closed. Nevertheless, I was aware of what was happening, and I could see.
I don’t know how to explain this.
There was a sensation I was able to identify as pain, although it didn’t actually hurt me. Then I felt as though my side were a bottle and a cork was being drawn from it. It popped free. The doctor held up a misshapen bullet for examination. I watched it fall in slow motion from his forceps, landing with a plinking sound in a metal pan.
“Other’s too close to the heart,” I heard him say. “Can’t get a grip on it. Don’t dare touch it, way it’s positioned. Kill him if it moves.”
Cut.
Same place, an indefinite period of time later. A nurse saying, “Oh, God, he’s going,” and then all of them talking at once.
Then I was out of my body.
It just happened, just like that. One moment I was in my dying body on the table and a moment later I was floating somewhere beneath the ceiling. I could look down and see myself on the table and the doctors and nurses standing around me.
I’m dead, I thought.
I was very busy trying to decide how I felt about it. It didn’t hurt. I had always thought it would hurt, that it would be awful. But it wasn’t so terrible.
So this is death, I thought.
And it was odd seeing myself, my body, lying there. I thought, you were a good body. I’m all right, I don’t need you, but you were a good body.
Then I was gone from that room. There was a rush of light that became brighter and brighter, and I was sucked through a long tunnel at a furious speed, and then I was in a world of light and in the presence of a Being of light.
This is hard to explain.
I don’t know if the Being was a man or a woman. Maybe it was both, maybe it changed back and forth. I don’t know. He was all in white, and He was light and was surrounded by light.
And in the distance behind Him were my father and my mother and my grandparents. People who had gone before me, and they were holding out their hands to me and beaming at me with faces radiant with light and love.
I went to the Being, I was drawn to Him, and He held out His arm and said, “Behold your life.”
And I looked, and I could behold my entire life. I don’t know how to say what I saw. It was as if my whole life had happened at once and someone had taken a photograph of it and I was looking at that photograph. I could see in it everything that I remembered in my life and everything that I had forgotten, and it was all happening at once and I was seeing it happen. And I would see something bad that I’d done and think, I’m sorry about that. And I would see something good and be glad about it.
And at the end I woke and had breakfast and left the house to walk to work and a car passed by and a gun came out the window. There were two shots and I fell and the ambulance came and all the rest of it.
And I thought, Who killed me?
The Being said, “You must find out the answer.”
I thought, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter.
He said, “You must go back and find the answer.”
I thought, No, I don’t want to go back.
All of the brilliant light began to fade. I reached out toward it because I didn’t want to go back, I didn’t want to be alive again. But it all continued to fade.
Then I was back in my body again.
“We almost lost you,” the nurse said. Her smile was professional but the light in her eyes showed she meant it. “Your heart actually stopped on the operating table. You really had us scared there.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She thought that was funny. “The doctor was only able to remove one of the two bullets that were in you. So you’ve still got a chunk of lead in your chest. He sewed you up and put a drain in the wound, but obviously you won’t be able to walk around like that. In fact it’s important for you to lie absolutely still or the bullet might shift in position. It’s right alongside your heart, you see.”
It might shift even if I didn’t move, I thought. But she knew better than to tell me that.
“In four or five days we’ll have you scheduled for another operation,” she went on. “By then the bullet may move of its own accord to a more accessible position. If not, there are surgical techniques that can be employed.” She told me some of the extraordinary things surgeons could do. I didn’t pay attention.
After she left the room, I rolled back and forth on the bed, shifting my body as jerkily as I could. But the bullet did not change its position in my chest.
I was afraid of that.
I stayed in the hospital that night. No one came to see me during visiting hours, and I thought that was strange. I asked the nurse and was told I was in intensive care and could not have visitors.
I lost control of myself. I shouted that she was crazy. How could I learn who did it if I couldn’t see anyone?
“The police will see you as soon as it’s allowed,” she said. She was terribly earnest. “Believe me,” she said, “it’s for your own protection. They want to ask you a million questions, naturally, but it would be bad for your health to let you get all excited.”
Silly bitch, I thought. And almost put the thought into words.
Then I remembered the picture of my life and the pleasant and unpleasant things I had done and how they all had looked in the picture.
I smiled. “Sorry I lost control,” I said. “But if they didn’t want me to get excited they shouldn’t have given me such a beautiful nurse.”
She went out beaming.
I didn’t sleep. It did not seem to be necessary.
I lay in bed wondering who had killed me.
My wife? We’d married young, then grown apart. Of course she hadn’t shot at me because she’d been in bed asleep when I left the house that morning. But she might have a lover. Or she could have hired someone to pull the trigger for her.
My partner? Monty and I had turned a handful of borrowed capital into a million-dollar business. But I was better than Monty at holding onto money. He spent it, gambled it away, paid it out in divorce settlements. Profits were off lately. Had he been helping himself to funds and cooking the books? And did he then decide to cover his thefts the easy way?
My girl? Peg had a decent apartment, a closet full of clothes. Not a bad deal. But for a while I’d let her think I’d divorce Julia when the kids were grown, and now she and I both knew better. She’d seemed to adjust to the situation, but had the resentment festered inside her?
My children?
The thought was painful. Mark had gone to work for me after college. The arrangement didn’t last long. He’d been too headstrong, while I’d been unwilling to give him the responsibility he wanted. Now he was talking about going into business for himself. But he lacked the capital.