Journals of Eleanor Druse, The (Digital Picture Book) (3 page)

Do you wanna know what love is?

WHEN HUMAN INTELLIGENCE IS
suddenly confronted by the supernatural, death (the purest of all epiphanies) may be instantaneous. Certain prodigies, wonders, abominations, monstrosities, freaks of nature, angels, demons, and other supernatural leaks into the material world are too much for us mere mortals to see. Such were Medusa and the serpent-haired gorgone Aeschylus wrote of, whom none could look upon without perishing. If we do not avert our eyes in time, we die.

Sometimes instead of dying instantly from fright or shock, we may survive the initial horror and astonishment, only to slowly waste away in the thrall of some terrible or numinous image burned onto the faceplate of memory, a single fixed idea. Beauty only the first touch of terror we can still bear, and all that. The great Borges wrote of the Zahir, which in Arabic means notorious and visible (one of the ninety-nine names of God). In Muslim countries, the Zahir also refers to beings or things that possess the terrible quality of being unforgettable and whose image finally drives people mad. It’s as if the Zahir or some other unforgettable fiend infects the mind with a frightful fixation more hideous than its original shape, and memory suckles it along to a fatal obsession that in the end turns and devours the mind that fed it. Death comes because we forsake the entire universe for one autochthonous idea.

Madeline Kruger’s ant-infested corpse dealt me just such a mortal, visionary blow. I gave up the ghost right there in the room, I guess. My knees gave out, my feet flew east, I fell west, and the back of my head smacked the marble floor.

Flat on my back, I looked up into the stark ceiling tiles and dead light fixtures and panicked:
my hip!
At my age, a firing squad is preferable to a shattered hip, and all the Fosamax in the world won’t protect you.
If my hip is fractured, please make my bed in the grave, thank you very much. Amen.

My half-formed death wish almost came true, and I watched, helpless, as blackness constricted my vision and squeezed out the visible world. I tumbled backward, like Alice falling down the rabbit hole, but only for a second. The next thing I knew, I was somewhere up near the ceiling tiles looking down and watching them call a code blue on yours truly.

Frankly, expiring right there on the floor was fine by me. I certainly didn’t want to die at home and haunt my own house. I wanted Bobby to have the place and not be vexed by the memory of finding me dead in one room or another;
if my time is up, so be it,
I thought.

I watched all the personnel bowing over my body and speaking to each other: “She’s unresponsive.” “Do we have a pulse?” “She’s not breathing.” “Is she gone?” I have a clear memory of being outside and above myself, looking down and seeing the code blue team come in with that cart full of tools and equipment. I love medical technology, and it was a delight to have a bird’s-eye view of it being deployed so earnestly to rescue me. I felt strangely detached about the outcome of the procedures. I was of two minds about whether to try and will myself back into that old arthritic bag of bones. Could I get an update on the hip first?

I saw the nuses and medical residents running needles and tubes into my arms, injecting me with drugs, giving me oxygen by mask. I recall being skeptical about whether all of this would do any good. Then dark fur crowded around my shrinking tunnel vision. I had the peculiar sensation of settling back down on the mattress of myself for a long winter’s nap.

Here it comes, I thought. The undiscovered country. The big show. The end of all plots. The cure for all diseases. The leap in the night.

May I have the last dance alone?

Being dead was the best thing that ever happened to me. Death was better than the book, better than the movie, better than all those philosophical speculations and theological revelations I’d read about in college. Too bad there was no way to send back word to all of those insipid flatlanders who think that the human soul is nothing more than static given off by brain cells. Alert! Incoming from freshly dead Sally Druse: You materialists are sorely mistaken.

Instead of the Big Nothing, I was pleased to discover an afterlife of deliciously dreamless eternal rest. It was too dark to tell if I had a body, but if I did, it felt as if I were submerged and drifting in a vast starless sea of warm black amniotic fluid. Not a care disturbed me, and I seemed to have just enough sightless awareness to enjoy the bliss of suspended animation without the unpleasantness of actual cognition. For the first time, here or hereafter, being was effortless; uncomplicated by memory, apprehension, guilt, loneliness, or pain. All the restorative benefits of deep sleep were mine, with none of the nightmares or waking fears—just an endless slow-motion falling through deep space to the sea of tranquility.

By some miracle, I was able to revel in this beatific state without quite being conscious of it. Instead, I seemed always on the verge of thinking, without ever rupturing the limen of what my philosophy professors had called apperception—the mental act in which the mind becomes aware of itself perceiving. Let that old Greek pederast Socrates prattle on about how the unreflective life is not worth living. This was unreflection at its finest, and it was a garden of vegetable raptures compared with the life I’d lived on earth.

Then I felt the tingle of a memory trace—Madeline Kruger and the little girl—and it was almost as if I’d wrecked it all by enjoying it. Had I somehow stepped outside of the delicious mindlessness of the afterlife by savoring it?

Sensations followed. My dreamy half-executed velleities became full-blown volitions. I moved an eyelid, then a finger, and then the unspeakable horror of consciousness loomed on the horizon like a gathering thunderhead.

Mother of Mary, I was headed back! Maybe the heat lightning of awareness flickering in the distance was just my leftover cortical static. Maybe if I kept my eyes closed and was careful not to breathe or move, I could slip back under the waves and descend again into that warm infinite blackness, forever.

But no. I bobbed and resurfaced. I heard sounds—beeping noises, rhythmic hissing, voices. Air filled my lungs, even when I tried not to breathe. Unwanted mental events kept disturbing my aimless reveries of death. For instance, if I was remembering things such as Madeline Kruger and apperception, didn’t that mean my brain was still working? Still with me? And the ants roiling in poor Madeline’s wounds! I remembered them, which might mean I had a brain to remember them with? What if I was keeping my eyes closed by a sheer act of will, which meant that I had eyelids and willpower, which meant… alas.

Another beep, more rhythmic hissing, voices. Then the cardinal symptom of mortal consciousness: pain. A headache, one bad enough to prove I had a head, same as a watch proves a watchmaker. If pain was part of the ambience, I should hurry back to the land of the living, because if the rumors were true, an afterlife headache could last forever and a day.

The back of my eyelids were indigo veined in bloodred—the color of a pregnant night sky ready to deliver a thunderstorm. I allowed them to slit open. What I saw might be heaven or hell, but if so, it was camouflaged as an intensive care unit.

Gowned and hooded figures hurried and bowed over me under bright lights. They carried sacramental vessels and chanted in Latin. A warlock with an ornamental headdress leaned over me with a weapon.

“That’s V-fib,” he said through a sacred mask. “Defibrillator! Paddles!”

So the bastard was going to spank me with a paddle.

Whoa! There I was back up on the ceiling again, looking down at the top of his covered head bowing over my flabby whiteness. Spank me with a paddle now, you beast. See if I care.

I was all the way out of body again. That’s right, and I knew a lot about near-death experiences. I’d read about them.

A low roar seemed to reverberate somewhere deep within my newly disembodied state (impossible, I know, the bewildering sensation of emptiness vibrating). The roar grew louder and seemed to bear me aloft, as if I were a hawk gyring in a thermal, but instead of soaring through cumulus clouds and empyrean blue, I was hurtling upward in a dark concrete passage made of stained cinder blocks and rusty tie-rods. I was rising toward a light at the top of it. When I looked down, I saw that I was ascending in an elevator shaft. Beneath me I could see descending elevator cars—cages, really, suspended by cables—crowded with people waving their arms, clawing at one another, reaching up to me, trying to escape, beseeching me, crying mercy. But the elevator cars continued their descent, down to where shadows warred with flames in the infernal depths far below.

I looked up again at the white radiance and continued rising toward it. I heard a voice calling to me from inside the light, and I sensed an ineffable presence, which seemed to be calling me toward it and reeling me in with tendrils of delicate light.

It was like reading a script for a schlocky TV movie called
Sally Druse and the Light at the End of the Dark Tunnel.
I have extensively studied what psychologists and neuroscientists in my field refer to as out-of-body experiences (OBE) and near-death experiences (NDE). In the 1980s I thoroughly researched the phenomena with Dr. Susan Blackmore, at the University of Surrey in England. So having such an experience myself made me feel like a psychiatrist stretching out on another analyst’s couch. Even while it was happening to me, I recalled thinking that except for a few idiosyncratic particulars, my afterlife interlude seemed to consist of an infinite cliché.

I wish I could report that I met the spirits of friends and relatives who had passed on before me and were eager to lead me toward the light, where a voice communicated with me telepathically, showed me the instant replay of my life on earth, and told me that I had nothing to fear because: All Is Well in the Hereafter, Sally Druse, Now and Forever, Amen.

Instead, as I drew near the radiance at the apex of the passage, the voice became distressed and the light slowly died, like the glow of an ember being soaked up by an absorbent blackness so vast and deep it glistened; as if I—a being of light—were about to be sucked inside a dark star or an obsidian crystal. I felt the same ineffable presence and heard it sigh in the smoldering ash.

The rushing abruptly stopped and gave way to a soundless void. The voice called out, and again I seemed to feel the timbre of its desperation resonate inside my newly incorporeal self.

It was the cry of a child, a little girl, whose inarticulate pleas were so forlorn and piteous it anguished me almost to bursting, for I had no tears or eyes to weep them. I suspect that no living writer commands a vocabulary capable of describing the voice I heard at the top of that elevator shaft, so where do I begin? The misery articulated in that pathetic cry was distinctly human, yet it was not of this world. That cry harrowed me with visions of what lay beyond the dying light: a kingdom of perpetual night, where death and darkness are the only lights, and the sightless damned cried out their fright. Somewhere in that sunless ocean clotted with nightmares a child was lost and alone. Though it seemed like a century ago, I remembered what the orderly with alcohol on his breath had said just before I’d left the world: “If you stick around she’ll probably wake up and start talking about you and the little girl again.”

I heard a bell ringing. A chime perhaps, or just a tinkling handbell of the sort used in the last century to summon the household to tea.

What little girl?

By the last feeble rays of the smoldering cinders, I saw (with what spectral sense organs, I don’t know) a creature standing guard at the top of the shaft, where the opening gave out into perpetual night. I could make out only his silhouette in the penumbral shadows: the head of giant jackal or anteater, the torso and body half man, half beast. Teeth glistened once and disappeared in the dark. Again I heard the distressing cries of the child—not words or speech, only lamentations, which seemed to express a century’s worth of loneliness and despair.

The child’s cry moved me to pity, but also to unspeakable dread that the creature guarding the gate should give me passage to a similar fate.

I looked down where the elevator cages had descended miles below the earth.

More chimes, bells ringing. Then I heard something beeping, as if terrorists had planted bombs somewhere in the shaft, and it was only a matter of seconds before the timers triggered the blasts and engulfed the passage in flames.

I was struck by lightning and opened my eyes under blinding artificial lights.

I COULDN’T TELL IF
it was morning or night, because I seemed to be in a pod with no windows to the outside and big drum lights shining down from above. I had a plastic pipe in my throat, held in place by a collar of some kind, and every five seconds or so a machine hissed and inflated me as if I were a beached blowfish. I was hemmed in on both sides by steel railings that reminded me of the cattle gates I’d seen out in the puckerbush on my Uncle Mort’s farm when I was a little girl. Everything smelled of alcohol and plastic, and my mouth tasted like medicinal lemon.

A pretty, thirtyish nurse in a gown and sterile gloves moved around my bed tending to electronic boxes on poles, and these gizmos were hooked up to me by tubes with fluid in them. I’d never seen her before, didn’t know where I was or how long I’d been there. I tried to talk, which made the plastic pipe in my throat buckle, but no sound came out. I couldn’t even grunt to get the nurse’s attention. I tried to reach out and touch her elbow, but my wrists were tied to the bed with soft restraints.

I saw a small group of men and women in white lab coats—doctors?—but recognized not one of them. They were gathering outside my…was it a room? Not quite. More like a display case with glass windows, where I was to be a specimen, sick in bed, gagged by a pipe in my throat, and exhibited half naked in my hospital gown for any rubbernecker who walked by and wanted to take a gander at a bare-assed old lady with a bad headache.