A Study in Lost Light
(Initial Entry in the Casebook of a Modern Alchemist)
Reprinted with permission from the reminiscences of John H. Prosper, M.D., retired medical officer in the Canadian Forces.
A Darkling Journey
I’ve had a recurring dream since I woke from my coma. I suppose it’s more of a vision than a dream:
In a dense conifer forest of needling sunlight and kinetic silence, a slender book floats in mid-air. Its unmarked cover of blue cloth opens slowly. And slowly the pages turn, each sturdy sheet imprinted with the bloody face of a soldier, civilian, or enemy combatant.
These are the people I had attended in Afghanistan during my service as a medic—the men and women who had died in my care, the ones I could not save.
The Canadian Forces paid for my education. In exchange for a medical degree and intensive training as an emergency surgeon, I signed on and served with a combat battle group in Kandahar Province through 2005 and well into 2006.
At the fierce, door-to-door Battle of Panjwaii, in September 2006, a Taliban bullet struck my shoulder. It shattered the bone and grazed my subclavian artery.
The Dutch soldier and American communications officer I had been tying off with tourniquets both subsequently died. I only survived because a Pashtun infantryman risked his life to pull me out of that firefight.
Airlifted to the Multinational Medical Unit at Kandahar Airfield, I underwent two high risk surgeries. During the second, an adverse reaction to the anesthesia plunged me into a coma. I woke three days later to a chill wind blowing through my bones.
The Forces returned me to Canada, and after nine weeks rehabilitation at a military base outside Montreal, they discharged me honorably. I tried resuming my advanced medical studies at McGill, but that was hopeless.
Waves of drowsiness often swooped through me, and familiar things smoldered with strangeness. Streets I’d walked for years led to unexpected places.
I knew the neuropathology of my symptoms. Brain damage. The percussive force of battlefield blast waves, traveling faster than sound, had repeatedly pummeled my cerebral cortex—right through my helmet and skull.
Dementia pugilistica. There is no treatment.
I dropped my internal medicine fellowship after three weeks and, without kith or kin, drifted west to Vancouver. I’d heard dreamy accounts of Rain City’s charm in each of the foster homes where I’d grown up, and I resolved to see for myself.
A change of scenery wouldn’t hurt, either. Or so I thought, until my flight’s descent over the snowcrest mountains above Vancouver.
As the plane rolled into its approach path, an eerie awareness of evil pressed close.
I immediately recognized what was happening. My bruised brain had a dark story to tell. I listened and heard my fear—not quite a voice, the repressed feeling of a voice: How am I going to cope with this disability? Who is this not-me that is the new me?
Life itself felt sinister to my broken mind.
Cloud plateaus far below composed the floor of heaven. Sunlight filled the interior of the plane so brightly I squinted. My ears popped.
And the gathering malevolence concentrated to a voiceless yet concise thought: We are falling, all of us, all the children of Eve, falling through heaven, like Lucifer, down into a tragic world.
I didn’t believe such twaddle and tried to reclaim my own thoughts. Coolly, I recalled that ‘Lucifer’ actually means ‘the bringer of light.’ My hurt brain was calling for the illumination of reason.
So, I reasoned.
We weren’t falling. We were coming in for a landing through the glare of afternoon sun.
My damaged nerves ignored reason. Ominous feelings graffitied the wall of my being—my mind—with these slashing words: They fell with Lucifer, the whole way down burning.
That intimate voice spoke persuasively from within horizontal rays slanting through the cabin: So much brighter than the day, they blazed like welders’ arcs as they crossed the sun.
I winced into the barbed sunlight outside the window, half-expecting to see streaks of phosphorus flares against the sun.
For an instant, I did! Hot scratches of light on the sun’s face made me think of satellites breaking up on re-entry.
I pushed that thought out of mind and dismissed what I’d glimpsed as a sliding floater, cellular debris in my eye. The quiet voice—really, the psychic pressure of a voice—had vanished.
I wasn’t going to listen to my broken nervous system. I was headed someplace new. Sure, life inside an abused brain had become a fizzy-edged thing close to madness. But it felt easier to meet that pitiful thing in a city I’d never visited.
the Freezine of
Fantasy and Science
Fantasy and Science
Fiction
No comments:
Post a Comment