Part 4 - Fields of Iowa

~~~A troubled mind and an open door~~~

My focus was firmly on the fever dream figment of the familiar farm. With Duck fastidiously fastened to terra firma at my right flank, I floated directionlessly over the flowering fields, frozen in place, fraught with indecision. Within striking distance of me was a door with an unmistakable hue, a distinct golden sheen- The very thing I had until just recently assumed was the whole point of my opioid-induced side quest… The very thing I had just given up on. After countless fruitless searches through memories and space and time, there it was… so plain and clear it was almost mocking me. And yet, when you spend so long chasing something, the idea of finally catching it becomes terrifyingly...final. Dogs don’t want to catch cars for real, you know? And when they do try in earnest they usually get a tire to the head. Hence the trepidation.

My eyes bounced left to right contemplatively until my focus shifted sideways to my deep periphery where I was able to peek into my other concurrent state back in the hospital operating room. A clock on the wall showed seven hours had passed since I had been confined in that antiquated asylum.

White coats and other monochromatic characters in scrubs rolled my transient, wheeled, railed prison cell down bleached and bland hallways from the PACU to a more permanent room. An array of tubes and wires tethered me to the temporary twin bed. An annoyingly bright anomaly in the form of a neon yellow wristband on my right arm informed the healthcare professionals that I was a “fall risk.” Not nearly as fashionable as the friendship bracelets I had refused to take off on the left wrist. I focused on their threads and strands intently, studying the details of the plastic beads and intricately intertwined strings that were at one point woven with care and intention. It was the only way I could prove to my floating farm self that it was indeed me down there in that cell. Textile and alloy loops loosely binding my radius and ulna in their meat sack were very much the only tether to that reality I had.

Nurses and aids dragged me from the gurney to a more permanent hospital bed and I watched as an intense, instantaneous look of anguish contort my pale face. I seemed to scream in agony. It looked like I couldn't breathe. My left arm looked like a lifeless appendage, haphazardly flopping around. A bandage wrapped snugly across the abdomen concealed some great surgical mystery amidst the pumps, tubing, and yellow grippy socks. Dainty, deftly-skilled hands gathered around an IV tower to shoot me full of morphine, fentanyl and leave. From the look of things I was unsure if I was dying, preparing for death, or if I was fine, but I figured whatever the eventuality was- the outcome was looming, and the clock was ticking so I should get back to my mission.
As the sea of activity calmed and I was about to abandon my omniscient view of the scene, the faint silhouette of a fine-lined phantom formed in the chair next to my hospital bed after everyone left. Opaque as cemetery fog obscuring an autumnal full moon in a scary movie, smooth and still like the first winter ice on Wyoming's Marion Lake, Fabergé egg-fragile, sitting silently and staring directly up at me in the aether quite unmistakably were a pair of axinite eyes.
I blinked. It was all gone.

“Well, that was weird,” I thought internally.
“Well, that was weird.” Audible words, not my own, broke the silence. It was the squatty, semi-sullen goat. Amidst a field of budding wildflowers adjacent to a garden with Duck at my side, the simple sounds of summer cicadas filled the dusk as his words sauntered off into the black mystery beyond the steamy thicket of yaupon and pine. I stared in the direction of the glinting entryway debating whether I should bolt for it and follow the girl in the green dress or if I should leave it alone and do something…anything…else.
I looked at the stout brown and white ungulate, hoping for some sort of sign or silent guidance.
No sign. No nod. No words. Just unoscillating oval eyes that made me think if he thought twice about anything, it would be two more thoughts than he’d had all day.

How fitting of a moment, too, because in dreamland or otherwise, I cling too tightly to things. I’ve oft been accused of not knowing when to quit. Show me something that I’ve wanted and I can instantaneously point out the bruises and scratches and claw marks I left on it from trying to keep it from slipping away, and maybe more importantly I can show off the scars from lost battles that I've personally accumulated as various partings have left their litany of unceremoniously unsurgical holes inside of me.
I’ve been regularly known to stick heroics out long enough to become the villain. If I were a boat captain, I could show you a graveyard of ships at the bottom of the ocean where my ghost swims with the grouper and glides through the coral all because I don't know how to abandon ship. It’s a gift and a curse, I guess, but if they made a merit badge for it, I’d wear it proudly.
They say you should carefully choose the hills you wish to die on. It’s good advice, which is probably why I never heard the phrase from Duck, although he did say at previous points that I was “too early” and that the door was not there “presently.” Maybe the right time had come, but too, maybe it was another trap. Either way, I knew time was running out. My inaction and indecision stemmed from the internal struggle of trying to decide if it was a hill I would be willing to die on.
There are the molehills of idiocy: the trite, pedantic, annoying, inconsequential, infinitely infantile idiosyncrasies of life. Things that are genuinely not worth the breath spent on the debate, but people seem to stake their flag in the ground and make their stand on them all the time, all the same, shouting senselessly from their soapbox to capture the interest of no one.
Then you also have your metaphorical Mount Moriahs: the hallowed ground of the saving grace salvation or, as others would argue from that same promontory- a storybook tale of unsubstantiabilities, but either way a much more important and prominent peak than the low relief mounds that are the finer points of politics or the frailty of the human ego, for example.

Knowing that every topographical rise can't be a place where you make your stand, I crunched the numbers in my head on the whole door situation. Mole hill, or mountain. Mole hill…Moutain. When the spinning slot machine reels of thought stopped, I whispered ever so faintly aloud to myself “Moriah”, nodding my head ever so slightly in affirmation that this one was in the category of things that are worth the effort and time to chase down regardless of what answers may or may not be beyond that threshold. It could be the empty room I had been disappointed in long ago. Might be the gateway to the other side itself. May be a portal beyond normal life and understanding that no one had ever seen, or it could all amount to an iceberg to my boat; another schooner resting on the sea floor. But even if it was oblivion itself which lay beyond the door, I resolved I would knowingly and willingly march through it relentlessly, pressing this search to the bitter end just to figure out what was on the other side, fueled by equal parts curiosity and the sheer blind inability to quit. They say that sort of thing kills people. And cats.

I looked over at the goat to find those idle oval eyes. He knew I had made up my mind.
“You won't be able to stay in this place forever, but you don't have to go back to the place you came from. You always have a choice.”
Not really what I needed to hear. I rolled my eyes and filed it under “general goat-prophecy riddle-limerick” and made a note to come back and revisit that tidbit of wisdom later. There was no time. I fixed my rolling eyes, fixed the insolent look on my face, and flashed a facsimile of the finest smile I could fake to Duck. With a flick of my feet I glided nervously to the shimmering door casing knowing full well that I was most likely a monarch attracted to a bug zapper, floating over a sea of grass and justifiable fear to the soft electric glow of a sizzling death. The winged insects probably don’t know that the blue light is going to turn them into a light show and well-done meal all at once; I don’t think they have that advanced thought capability. I, however, took every iota of time to to bask in the impending inevitability that if this actually was THE door that I had been searching for in this druggy dream, I wouldn't be ready for what was inside, or it would be underwhelming, or that it would be the end of everything.

I stopped shy and took a moment to linger in the vestibule to contemple one last time what could be on the other side- pot of gold, ransacked ruins of emptiness, confetti, that giant stone death boulder from Indiana Jones. The Scooby-Doo caliber mystery was about to come to an end, but for the moment I felt like I was more at home than in foreign land. There was a vague familiarity to the shape, sheen, and subtleties. Something about it felt right.

Gently I eased up as close to the door as I could get. I reached my hand out to touch the handle. I’d know brushed 304 stainless steel in any life, alternate reality or dream. It has a certain texture and hand-feel, a muted sheen that gives away its tactile characteristics. The grasping surface was warm from bathing in the long, perpetual glow of evening light and worn smooth by the history of what must have been thousands of hands wanting entry. The air had an electric touch similar to burgeoning atmospheric static before lightning erupts above your head and smites you down indiscriminately then starts a forest fire with your charred remains. But it still felt right.

Fingers firmly coiled, I pushed.

Nothing happened.

My heart sank.

I looked around to catch a glimpse of an engraving on the door. “Pull."

I pulled.

The door was heavy as it silently and willingly hinged open.

My heart floated.

There were no squeaks, catches, or spooky noises.

I pulled until it was just us two; an open door and a troubled mind.

~~~Wardenclyffe Lodge~~~

Beyond the rectangle of darkness was the most spectacular, cavernous, elaborate space that exuded a type of character that only comes with generations of carefully curated memories. Lit by dozens of points of soft flickering flame light, massive pillars made from entire debarked pine tree trunks held an ornately decorated vaulted roof that was supported by intricately carved hand-hewn wooden rafters that were as massive in width as the lintels of Stone Henge but many more times as long. Gnarled branches in unique shapes formed a network of railings on the upper balcony. At the far end of the room was a grand fireplace encased in massive blocks of red-orange aeolian sandstone. Dutiful flames rolled and crackled from the hearth filling the room with a record-player static sound, echoing the clicks and pops and white noise throughout. The light sweet smells of camp fire, sun-soaked pine, and elementary school-steeped memories; like crayons and little blue plastic chairs with chrome legs, sat gently in the air. It was a building any architect would marvel at.

To my left was a giant elevated stage framed with heavy velvet curtains. The thick white oak planks hinted at their age with light chips and gouges from use and a yellowing of the varnish that only comes with time. The stage was devoid of all decoration and adornment save for a shadowy figure with a long, slender, flowing outline. As if called by a siren’s song, I drifted over and up the 4 steps with a slow uncertainty, not knowing if it was a figment in this dream or part of the plot of my farmville/goat hallucination. Or death. It could always be death. As a moth goes to a flame though, I was helpless. There was no alternative even if I wanted one. And I did not want one. Slowly I closed the distance between us to finally face what it was I’d been chasing down since the first moment when i accidently stumbled upon it.
She possessed a piercing perspicacity that melded shrewdly with palpable sense and sensibility. The most exquisite and rare energy radiated from her like the wild purple tendrils from a tesla coil; It was an invisible, inimitable, irrevocable presence that was undeniable and familiar. Her aura and silhouette were so distinctive that I was certain I had known her before that moment ever manifested and I was sure beyond all doubt that I would be able to instantaneously distinguish her in any life or reality after that instant in time. She was the embodiment of timelessness.

With a warmness that matched the light and unspeakable natural grace she extended her long, well-toned arms which were tanned golden from the summer sun and reached towards me to invite a dance. There was no beat, no melody. And even if there had been, dancing is not something I would say that I know how to do. But since it was the obvious thing, I reticently obliged.

Any attempt to try to explain how the nanosecond felt when we first joined hands would be an embarrassment to the English language. When our fingers interlaced, the energy instantly amplified. Flames became brighter, the air hummed and buzzed with a flurry of electrons. I could see sounds and hear colors and see sparks fly. It was not a thing that can be conveyed with words.

It was the vanguard of chilling air ahead of a cumulonimbus cloud wall that ushers in an early fall Texas hill country cold front.
It was the wild inconceivability the Nauset felt when they saw a huge ship landing on their shore in 1620.
It was the moment you hear a rattlesnake near you but can’t find it.
It was when your mother would toss a bunch of warm, soft towels and sheets fresh out of the dryer on you in the middle of February when you were home from school on a fake sick day.
It was the wonder of seeing a magic trick for the first time back when you believed in it.
It was the shock you feel the instant your body hits the icy water of a snowmelt stream you were dared to jump into.
It was the revolution and awe of seeing the very first electric lights turning on in Wabash, Indiana in 1880.
It was the moment you glance over your shoulder and realize your dad isn't holding your bike up anymore and you’re actually riding.

Up to that point I had only sensed her, but between the spinning I took the opportunity to see her. In the warmly lit silence her dark, deep, narrow eyes of green and grey and tawny would have looked intimidating were it not for her thin lips fighting to hold back a wild smile.

Whisping around in a waltz her cotton dress of viridescent aurora borealis green rippled and rolled like the late July corn fields of Iowa that drape the Driftless Area. The clover color accentuated her lightly bronzed chlorine-kissed summer skin. Straight, shoulder-length blonde hair bleached by the beaming light of the dog days of Texas swished carelessly in a blur. The strands were almost iridescent, glowing the color of yellow lightning from the fleeting golden rays of the dying evening light that whispered in through wavy glass in the wood framed windows.

Not a word was said, just an autonomous knowing and jointly understood coordination of movement through moment and milieu together in a flurry of green and gold gracefully gliding over worn, well-loved, quietly creaking oak.

As we floated around I instinctively closed my eyes for an infinitesimally small iota of time to be met with visions of Roman Candles cutting across a Texas summer sky, the soft thuds of hooves on red rodeo dirt, sparkling downtown city lights, a car lit by the soft glow of the stereo, the roar of a cruel summer crowd at a stadium concert. Hysterical laughter in a hotel room, closing out a hill country ice house. It was a beautifully bright and brief explosion of technicolor. It was enchanting, enrapturing. It was good.

I could have stayed there until the entirety of the sun-soaked season was swallowed by a supernova. Though I willingly and knowingly closed my eyes, I almost immediately regretted it because I knew that when I opened them again I would not be in the place. My arms would be empty. The room and everything in it would all be gone, not to return: the emerald dress, the sounds, the smells, the golden light, the Atlantic eyes, the yellow lightning hair. The flames would dim, the leaves would turn to rust, all of the greens would turn to golds and then to dust. It was a thing as ephemeral as bluebonnets in the spring. No closing ceremony, fanfare or explanation. One day here and the next day gone.

Eyes shut tightly, I embraced her like I would never have the opportunity to do so again because I knew that for a multitude of reasons it could very well be the last time I was in that room, in that reality, in that world, in that moment, as I was most likely just passing through as the benefactor of good timing and good luck. The words of Robert Frost rolled gently through my mind- “...So dawn goes to day. Nothing gold can stay.”

Hoping against everything I knew was true, I slowly relaxed my face and peeked through my parting eyelids to let the faintest, finest photons begin to paint the picture on my retinas. A silvery opaque orange light flooded in. Then came the greens. Then came the smell of pine. Then the blades of grass. Then the colorful blurb from a smattering of flowers. Then a fluffy, furry, brown and white goat.

I was back outside where I started, just me and Duck.

~~~Outsiders~~~

“It was a lie when they smiled and said, ‘You won’t feel a thing.’” He said with a semblance of a goat smile.

I stared off past the horizon in a mental state of shock. Everything good had gone away. None of the things I searched for could I actually obtain and keep. There was no pattern to what I could find and when. And the stupid blinking…close the eyes and everything goes away not to return as it was. It was all frustrating, confusing, and disheartening. I languished outside in the small field of wildflowers for what felt like eons with Duck silently by my side. Under chrome-colored clouds that scattered the majestic sherbet-orange evening rays into the most spectacular radiant beams of dying light, I contemplated the meaning of life and other existential theorems in drug dream world. Duck crunched on the flowers next to me. Savage animal.

Finally I replied. “I hate the ending, myself. But it started with an alright scene.” I said as I nodded in agreement, silently grieving the loss of whatever it was I had just witnessed. I had been fixated on four walls beyond campfire-colored doors for what seemed like a fortnight, so much so that I had driven myself 3/4ths crazy wondering if the glint was real or manifested in my mind. Yet there we were after it all, and I had nothing but questions. Was the glittering even gold or was it just a certain shade of foolish pride that fueled the churning wheels of a fool’s errand in the pursuit of fool’s gold? It felt real, but it also felt real gone.

"Was any of it true?” I asked Duck.

“All of it. You will see that room again, but you have no time to mourn. You must prepare a speech.” he nonchalantly said with a mouth full of flowers.

I was further annoyed that even in my drug-induced dreams, I somehow had homework. The goat’s assignment was ill received news to me, especially since there was no audience where we were, and I had nothing to speak on. I took more time to wallow in my own self-pity and lament that not even that weird ghost dared to haunt me anymore.

“Goat, I can give you a disjointed, poorly written Memoir of scars suffered at the hands of the irreverent harshness of life but I have no speech. And even if I did, there is no one here to tell this story to. Why are you telling me this?”

“They're coming. Just tell them what you know.”

Just then I had an epiphany. I began to consider the possibility that this whole place was death and I was just slightly ahead of the events in the hospital; that this farm was nothing but reprobates and degenerates and the horses were kelpies and the girl in the green dress was a harpy, a harbinger of the impending storm of demise and that I was simply a floating balloon in a black parade. Nothing mattered, everything was made up, and there was no order or sense to be had anywhere. Besides, in what conceivable reality is a goat the paragon of virtue?
Dismayed, disgruntled and in a fit of insubordination, I decided to exercise my free will. I got up with the intent to walk away. I decided the dream wasn't fun or good anymore, and I didn’t like it, so I picked a direction and started to step.

Duck looked toward but not at me.

"Do you want to get well?" He asked.

Up until that question I had never considered that I was unwell, even though I was watching myself in surgery land. I had lost the plot a little. Obviously the answer in my mind was yes, but I also knew based on all my experiences of being alive that pain was the price of admission for these sorts of things. I cringed and ran the numbers in my head, contemplating the cost.
“Close your eyes.” He said.

A lightning bolt burst of bright white light exploded and the hospital timeline flashed into view. I watched a team of nameless, faceless people scurry around me in a time-lapse. They ran tests. Removed tubes. Walked with me around a room. I saw myself being driven home. I saw myself in an empty house. I was clutching an abdomen wound, sitting slumped sideways in a brown leather chair, but I was alive when I’m sure I could have also easily ended up dead.
Slightly shocked I survived, I kept my eyes closed tightly but asked the goat-

“What did it cost?”

Another burst of white light but this time a different scene in black and white.

On a balcony terrace overlooking a small lake a pair of eyes, moody and slow to forgive like the wistful Winter Harbor waves that wax and wane from tawny to emerald, scanned a document in bemusement and ingested words at a feverish pace.

“By the time you read this, I’ll not be as whole as I once was…you were a supernova…”
The glyphs of the letter entered narrow eyes through dilating pupils. Thousands of words from the same hand had broached that hazel iris portal previously; well-versed, poised and crudely elegant words, if a touch too hyperbolic and flowery.

“…In that moment everyone was gone. Nothing was wrong. There was a fire. And you. And music. That moment encapsulated everything I wanted and showed me I made the right choice…”.
The words slowly turned acrid by the time they migrated through the synapses of her mind. Thin, well-defined eyebrows furled ever so slightly, and eyes grew stormy.

“…I hope this story is not done and I hope you’re in the end of the book, but if it all ended right now…I'd do it all again if it was the road that led to you…”
A heretic heart hammered in her pericardium, an involuntary reaction to the flood of adrenaline the brain had already sent as an alarm. The words were received as a virus as they snaked through the burgundy brooks of her veins.

“...it's likely that now…we drift apart as before. Whatever the circumstance… if you said you needed me or help or anything, I would get to you or I'd die running…”
The thin, straight line of her mouth morphed into a frown. Brow furled. Small nose scrunched. The page of smattered sans-serif hieroglyphics burned away in maroon flames and mica smoke.

The scene faded to my post hospital recovery slumped husk in the brown chair, one hand clutching his abdomen, one hand holding onto the phone, reading indiscernible words from a text message as I watched sallow complexion turn pallid.

“The letter.” I said to duck.

Of all the possibilities in the calculus of probable responses to a correspondence of the ilk, rage, anger, hatred, and disgust of that magnitude didn't compute. They were never even considered as part of the equation. An elegy is not meant to incite anger but I watched it as plain as the day just as I watched everything around that broken, scarred, gaunt, drugged, surgically repaired man in the chair incinerate in hot summer scarlet flames and smoke as black as a cat. I opened my eyes.

“Pain is always the price of admission…” I mockingly reiterated to myself as I let out an audible, singular laugh at how badly that went. “Hmm…maybe I do die afterall,” I thought. Because this definitely was not better. Maybe I was not out of the woods yet. Surely if all was well in hospital land, I would not be floating around free-form in farm land watching myself languish.

“What was that you mentioned about getting well, goat?” I asked. Because what I had just witnessed was not outwardly an improvement of any circumstances.

“Sometimes before it gets better, the darkness gets bigger.”

Duck had trotted over closer to where I was, only about five steps from where I had been sitting earlier, to give me that little tidbit of ungulate wisdom. He knew when I got up earlier that I was not actually going to leave. I think he knew I had a problem quitting anything and immediately called my bluff, but I was no less frustrated.

“I’m getting tired of your riddles and games, Goat. Why can’t you speak in plain English and just make sense of all of this madness?”

I didn’t yell at him necessarily, but I spoke to him with a tone that would probably make other goats tilt their heads down, squint their beady eyes, and ram my shins.

“Sometimes the person you’d take a bullet for is the one who is behind the trigger.”

Nonsensical. But I didn’t want to argue with an anthropomorphized animal any longer, and to be fair, it was a pretty cool line. Prophetic, perhaps.
“So what do I do now then?” I asked. Because I was at a loss.

“Write like you're running out of time.”

I began to walk around and try to figure out where to even begin. Having no advice, story, dream, or otherwise made things a real challenge. After what must have been minutes of pacing in a circle, out of the corner of my eye in the shadows of the forest, I caught an almost translucent pair of fawn eyes floating like a phantom, gently illuminating the darkness within the sweltering loblolly pines. Quiet. Stern. Kind. Soft. Familiar. The sight brought me some solace; maybe the ghosts were still haunting me. Maybe there was a better ending to this weird story and it wasn't all death, loss, and destruction. Maybe it was not a ghost, maybe it was an Angel all along…what’s the difference between ghosts and angels save for opacity and intention, anyway?

I got the courage to peer deeper into the forest and meet those eyes only to watch them melt into the darkness and disappear as soon as I made a move. I cautiously walked even closer to face the woodlands where those fleeting eyes had just been. There were no sounds. No movement. Just a sea of emerald and black, and the burned in memory of cinematic cinnamon eyes that disintegrated and disappeared into the atmosphere like Americano steam.

I should have been distraught, and I did have a horrible foreboding sense of loss, but also I had the urge to chase the ghost; to track it down; to find where it went. So I decided that’s what I would do- I’d chase the ghost. I had to write a speech for the goat anyway, and I was quite ready for another adventure.

As I stared at the empty space where something once was, in agreement with the wraith that was, I slowly closed my eyes.

Part 3

Part 3 (View the album and look at the most recent pictures for the other parts if you want.)

They say “seek and you will find."

Maybe they are wrong.
Maybe they are idiots…
Maybe they have never set off on a lofty search for a thing that might only exist in the mind.

I stared blankly into the snow glazed caldera of an extinct volcano and I saw only the wind; certainly not what I was seeking.

Behind the 1000 yard stare in my left periphery was a hazy diorama of the farm and forest from where I had started this journey.
Clearly before me in my center field of vision was an immense snow covered valley that was once a lake of lava.
In my right field of view: surgeons and scalpels and sterilized stainless steel tools doing a ballroom dance around my body.

Duck saddled back up beside me.

“If you're stuck, go anywhere but nowhere. Just keep going.”

Feet firmly planted, I turned my head to stare sarcastically at the goat, very obviously not mobilizing one inch or intending to for the foreseeable future.

“The beginning. I said go to the beginning…” the goat explained as he whipped up a little hologram movie scene for me to watch. My own life…years and years in the past.

In his miniature scene a younger version of me was positioned 2nd in a 2 person expedition into the dark recesses of the world’s longest slot canyon.

Stoic and ambivalent to my presence the red sandstone draped the landscape from canyon to spire.

“This is where you got sick." Duck said.

I watched as my young hologram self fought at a sloth-like pace to move forward. Finally I saw myself scratch and claw through the sandstone and silt to emerge at the other end of the canyon. Blue skies. Flat land. But at what cost?

I knew exactly what the goat was showing me and what he meant. My memory ran back to that place, flashes of the battles rushing to me in a blur. On the front lines, yet still ignored for years.

The time warp was a tempest in my head. I vividly recalled the severe and constant back and forth which seemed like the infrastructure for progress but turned out to be a razor sharp whipsaw ripping through the thoughts, memories, and emotions that hold a person together until finally a cold jagged steel tooth rips through the last thread of fate that’s holding everything together, the freshly unbound matter that makes us who we are spilling like an oil slick to the lowest possible point while the pigment of well perfused skin gives way to shades of necrotic gray.

They say “grown men don't cry." (excepting Tim McGraw).

Internalize it. Package it. Throw all the stress, cortisol, and panic into the destitute neighborhoods of the mind where there are no street lights at night and the doors are made of weathered, delaminating plywood to keep out any prying eyes even though the windows have long since been busted out with bricks letting insects and varmints freely pass through and take up residence…Trash pandas and tree rats rummaging through the shards of broken dreams feasting on the rotting remnants. Let the streets of that place be the road to ruin itself. Never visit it again.

You know, they also say if you keep all that stuff in it’ll kill you…

The vermilion dust devil of canyon country that Duck was projecting before me morphed before my eyes into a menagerie of skyscrapers. I saw myself overlooking cement spires of a densely overdeveloped downtown from the 13th floor of a hotel room. The memories flooded back. The smiley face someone had drawn on the bathroom mirror that only showed up in the steam from a hot shower. The dead silence in a city of noise. The twinkle of metropolitan lights. The insurmountable mile between McCue road and me. The ghost in the room.

At last that scene evaporated in front of me, and how fitting to have my field of view again filled with the rim of a dormant volcano in shared silence with a goat as flakes of snow danced in pretty patterns as if guided by a benevolent witch’s hand; spirals and spheres of frozen water crystals dancing through the air like dragonflies watching me in silence.

(In the surgical world timeline, an iPhone lit up somewhere. New email. The letter... 1055am)

“So what now?” I asked. I felt like the goat-guide rule book was similar to the genie-in-a-bottle one where you get 3 wishes or limited questions so I tried to pick my spots.

“Make it be for something.
Make it mean something.
Make a difference.”

Farm and forest to my left. Pumps and machines blood and guts to my right.
Two roads diverged in a wood, not a golden door to be had.

“Sometimes the things you’re looking for don’t want to be found. You can not force good timing, not even in dreams.”

I stared at the vast snow covered crater in front of us. If the door wanted to show up and open, it would. It would find me. It had not, and I fully acquiesced to the premonition that I should listen to the living lawnmower and keep moving in the brume. I knew he was right somehow and he seemed to stick by me and be there when I needed him..

“Was it even real?” I asked him in a frustrated, defeated tone, knowing he’d understand the intricacies behind the question; Knowing I really meant-
“Did it ever even happen or is it a memory I made up? Am I chasing an Idea that never existed, or did I actually touch the door, feel the smoothness of the handle, and experience the space inside of its walls? Did I have it all in my hands or was it a dream? What am I even supposed to be doing here in THIS dream? IS this a dream?”

His answer was predictably useless and avoidant, but somehow wise-sounding as well:
"Fight until you can't fight anymore. Lie down. Bleed awhile. Get up. Fight some more."
Duck cantered away to the forest.

I laid on the cold hard ground and contemplated options- If the golden door didn't exist why search? Why not go back to the recovery room in the hospital?

I glanced to my right periphery where the hospital scene lingered ever presently but unobtrusively.

The doctor hunched over a desk making notes on a laptop.
“...I took a new fresh Tisseel and completely covered my left hepatic lobe transection bed with Tisseel. I then mobilized that falciform ligament, keeping its pedicle blood supply from the hepatic hilum and I tunneled that over my left hepatic lobe transection site for coverage…”

In the monochrome operating room I spotted that phantasm sitting on the table by my head. Her head turned towards me ever so slightly and I felt a flash of screaming color in the black and white world. I had hitherto, in the real world or any of the fake ones dreamed into existence, never seen brown eyes iridesce, like alpenglow irradiating the bark of a Sequoia tree, or unbridled evening beams scattering through a Glencairn glass filled with Texas bourbon. Friendly, reassuring eyes.

Feeling as though I was safe in that operating room, I got up off of the snow, closed my eyes, and darted over to the deep blue skies and emerald fields of grass that undulated harmoniously in the scene to my left. Almost instantaneously I was back where I started and more lost than I was when I showed up.

I cared little about the golden door. The past scenes that Duck showed me hung in the air- all echoes and shadows. I lost my taste for the fight.

Fenced in by white pickets, standing in a sea of gently waving verdant green grasses, red barn in the distance, sun spilling its desperate late stage evening rays of light, Duck came running to greet me in the horse pasture.

“These horses are going to get mad at you being in their pasture." I joked with him.

"I'm one of them because I walk among them.”

"You're no horse, goat.”

“My heart is like a stallion.” He insisted.

“They love it more when it’s broken?” I asked.

He ignored me. "In the right light my shadow is as big as theirs.”

And indeed the shadows were long and the light source seemed lower than it had been when I first visited this place. Duck and I walked aimlessly in the slanting rays of misty twilight.

“Can I just stay here? You know, lie down and bleed a while, right?"

"You could, but you'd miss the party.” He flicked a horn as if to motion at the horizon before us.

Far ahead I saw a peculiar movement in a land that I thought was devoid of humans. A faint flash of life hovered like a mirage- It was a girl in a green dress walking towards a wall of doors. I cocked my head and felt a sensation that they were a stranger I knew everything about. The towering figure sank into the shadows behind the industrial metal doorframe which was bathed in the tangerine glow of a sky aflame with an intricate tapestry of rose and ember.

From our great distance and through squinty eyes, it almost looked as if the door was golden.

Part 2

--Part the 2nd--

It gets said often when speaking generally of anything but specifically departing physical existence in this world "they say… "
They say you see a light. They say you'll be free. They say you'll see your loved ones.
Maybe you run out of film and just don't remember anything. This isn't a meta make-you-ponder-existence story, but I'd submit to you that wondering what happens is probably a better question than the ones you normally ask.

Call that epidural anesthetic transformation, teleportation, consciousness, the red pill, call it what you want to; I was free; able to go where I wanted and to appear when and wherever I wanted. I was free to fly the pale blue skies no longer bound to the boring modes of transit that come when you’re confined to a corpse. I hovered above the surgeon and took in the view from above the OR.

Sterile surgical sheets. Tubes transmitting telemetry. Wires jutting from intercostals, guts splayed out of a body-width Mercedes-Benz Incision, busy gloved hands in a flurry of activity.

1015am.

“That’s dope.” I thought to myself. But I was bored of watching my body down below me. It always took me where I wanted to go and I have a deep reverence for it but I didn’t see a point in sticking around for the show. Wasn't interested in if I lived or died; in the moment I could do whatever I wanted, and I wanted to live my story.

I decided quickly to spend my temporary abilities and time looking for that golden door that I had first caught a glimpse of years ago; the glinting hue had become a color I'd searched for since. I wanted to study it, to decode it, to unlock it, and to see what was behind the ornate outer markings. Knowing that at worst, the space behind the door was nothing special and that, at best, it would be an absolutely epic journey and I'd be a fool if I didn't exhaust every option in an attempt to find out what was hiding beyond the threshold. I've always been a sucker for a good chase.

{Sidebar: Truth be told I'd actually been inside the door once, a year or so before all of this. Maybe it was broken, maybe it was good timing and good luck, maybe it was just my time. Maybe it was sent from up above. maybe it was a glitch…but I was inside. I had been content with a slow burn; to slowly study the locks, search for clues, and take my time to learn about what this whole thing was before making an attempt to get in but in a conspiring moment of fortune the door opened itself and asked me inside. The room beyond the entry was ample in size, uninspiring, and diametrically opposed to the shimmering adornment of the entry itself. It was adequate but underwhelming. After looking around, I left but I spent the days after convincing myself there had to be more; treasure hidden beneath the floor, bags of raw diamonds stashed in the walls. Fulfillment. Contentment. I knew in my own mind that this was my room of requirement (that's a Harry Potter reference) and I had to get back in.}

With my mind made up on my mission,I hovered at the apex of the ceiling as the operating room softened to a gray foggy haze, the sterile, misty atmosphere evaporated and everything faded to a white nothingness.

An exquisitely orange and cerulean evening sky conjured itself from the temporary nothingness and I flew through the cotton-candy blue undetectable to anyone or anything.The sinking sun burst its last dying dreams of light beams over the landscape like a firehose spraying amber on everything it touched. The most beautiful warm tones draped the lush summer landscape as I descended downwards in search of the golden door and the secrets hidden beyond the hinges.

Beneath me gently rolling hills of blue stem and buffalo grass populated the pastures that unfurled between the clear creeks that darted in and out of old growth pine forests. I landed in a horse field beneath the dusky azure sky and used the white pickets radiating from a rust red barn to guide me to its entrance. The barn was large, red, smelled like grain and sweat and horse and heat. Galvanized standing seam metal roof. Cupola. Windvane. Your quintessential barn looking barn. Red dun, dapple gray, bay roan and tobiano horses ambled in the thick green pasture, wandering aimlessly and disinterested in how out of place I was as I traversed from their field to their barn to the edge of the woods searching for clues of something…anything.

They say when you lose something- start your search at the last place you remember seeing it.

Everything felt wrong though. It wasn't the right place or right time. It wasn't right.

A noise from the shadows of the thick woods nearby drew my attention. Branches moved and cracked. The mental calculus was immediate - A Leviathan of the shadow black ocean behind the fringe forest…an enemy. Maybe death itself, come to claim me and take me back…

From a small opening in the underbrush a 2ft tall portly brown and white pygmy goat cantered over to me. His name was Duck. I knew that because he had a cartoony sign around his meaty neck that said "Duck."

"You're early." He told me.

I stared blankly trying to compute what was happening because even though flying and teleporting wherever was apparently possible, a talking spirit guide goat wasn't on the fever dream bingo card and yet here we were… beady eyed, bearded goat staring at my dumbfounded, mouth breathing, eyes glazed over, drug dreaming self.

"The golden door is not here presently." He told me.

Lingering in the confusion and lack of a further plan, I pet his round belly with enthusiasm as little clouds of dust radiated from his coarse fur with each pat. I fist bumped his head and he trotted off to eat some sweet gum leaves and I set off to look for the golden door, because I determined it best to not trust talking goats. Besides, he said it wasn't here presently… not that it didn't exist…maybe this animal was a trickster.

Since I could go wherever I wanted and drop into places that I had completely fabricated, I went skyward to get a 10,000 foot view of my situation.

The sun still hovered in the sky casting the same golden glow. Shadows got neither longer nor shorter and the warm tones cascading over the land never changed their timbre.

The door existed elsewhere. It had to. Like a rapidfire slideshow I searched all the places I thought it might be. I went through them in a blur, scanning diligently at each;

An October balloon-filled sky in Albuquerque.
A sea of spring time bluebonnets in White Hall Tx.
The new moon night sky above the Chisos Mtns.
Rusting birch and sugar maples on the Maine coast.
On a horseback ride along Cypress Creek.
The white sugar sands of Pensacola.
In the geothermal springs of Thermopolis WY.
The Sea Caves around San Diego.

I looked under the lights of the Houston Rodeo, between the red bark of the Sequoias, along the limestone cliffs off the coast of Mallorca. I searched in a bottle of Texas red wine, hunted through the allies of Cartagena, peaked in the Strasbourg Cathedral, and wandered the Council Bluffs.

There was no door in the black hills of South Dakota. Excessive though doorless beauty in Kananaskis. Nothing to report in the Montana Rockies and only the loudest sea of loneliness on the streets between the spires of New York City.

Crunching a pine cone on the snow glazed rim of the Valles Caldera I stopped to reconcile that this may be one of the very rare times in life that I was all the way wrong. I'm no stranger to mistakes or messing up, but I rarely get it totally utterly completely wholly wrong.

Maybe Duck meant that the golden door never existed, but that defied all logic and reason. It was rare, I was there, I saw it. I lived it. It was real. It existed. I remembered it all too well.

But then again maybe I dreamt it up. I started wondering if maybe I saw something in a mirage. Maybe I was chasing the ghost of a good thing. I suppose these things can happen when you meld real life with anesthesia and lucid dreams. Maybe I was wasting my time.

At a loss, I leaned on a thick deep red Ponderosa pine and stared off at a herd of brown elk in the distance. My size 12 Altra Lone Peak 5 shoe crunched another giant pinecone as I felt a horn stab to the thigh.

Duck.

“What am I doing, miniature devil horse? What am I looking for? Why am I here? Why not just call it off? Lay where I am and wait for the vultures…”

“Go back to the beginning.”

Dumb goat…All the places I could go and this figment…this metaphor…this ungulate wanted me to go back to an operating room. I was running out of options and had no real direction though so I thought it would be worthwhile to heed the livestock this time.

I popped back in to see myself still on the table, dissection in progress. An assistant dug around my warm squishy organs while the attending surgeon wrote some notes that I glanced down at-

“…took down the triangular ligament
with a combination of cautery and LigaSure, dissected back to
the inferior vena cava and encircled the left hepatic vein,
dissected that out and kept it encircled with a vessel loop.
then encircled the portal with a blue vessel loop as well to
set ourselves up for a Pringle maneuver if needed.
Took down the falciform down to the ligamentous attachments down to
the hepatic hilum, dissected within the hepatic hilum. I then
cautiously dissected out and skeletonized out the left hepatic
artery going up to the left hepatic parenchyma”

If the surgeon was trying to impress me with medical vernacular and multi syllable words- it worked.

“I was able to encircle the remainder of that left
hepatic lobe with its branch of left hepatic vein with an
umbilical tape, with the hanging maneuver, then took a Covidien
tan load stapler and transected across the remainder of the
hepatic parenchyma as well as intrahepatic left hepatic vein…”

As I began to find the state of affairs in the OR boring, I started to ascend back to better places but noticed at the last moment someone was sitting on the table with me, short legs in cut off jean shorts dangling nonchalantly off the stainless table. An apparition I surmised. I caught a fleeting glimpse of whiskey brown eyes and a gold hoop earring and then it was all gone.

Back in the snow dusted high country I kicked the ice clusters and pine needles around me and yelled for the goat. The clip clop of little hooves heralded the coming of my guide. I looked at Duck and threw my hands in the air as if to ask it “WTF was that for?”

“Some people are alive but walking through this world dead. And some people are dead who would love to be alive. Live for the ghosts.”

No idea what it meant, but it was profound for a four legged, trash eating bag of fur

I was no less lost though, meandering through my own wildest dreams and yet somehow unable to find the one thing I set out to look for all while my meat-mecha suit was in a TBD state above a cold stainless table and under cold stainless scalpels.

Part 1

She was perched apathetically atop a paddle board on the red-letter waters of the San Marcos river rowing laboriously upstream towards Spring Lake. Stopping momentarily to pull waves of sandy blonde shoulder length hair that had been dancing with the unseasonably brisk March north wind into a top knot, we conversed while she stared off into the comparatively warm crystal clear spring water as it flowed under a blanketed gray central Texas sky.

"Tell a story."

It has been some kind of day and the truth had become too dull to stir her senses.

A simple enough request but I don't really do stories, it’s not my gift. At times my brain has created crazy, vivid dreams though.
I contemplated the latest in my head, thinking it might suffice as some kind of epic tale. The general plot was that I was heading to some unspecified but risky life saving operation which I had known about for scores of time but finally couldn’t wait any longer. In typical me fashion I just approached medical death row with characteristic haphazard, cavalier irreverence. Plus it was a dream. I could do whatever I wanted. And if I died…it was a dream. And if I wanted to fly…It was a dream.

We paddled against the strengthening current as we got closer to San Marcos Springs, the source of the artesian water that made Spring Lake. The river shallowed under a bridge beyond Sewell park and we decided to turn around and float down stream, drifting past one another when the current dictated or lagging behind as we skimmed the glassy surface gliding next to Texas wild-rice, over gigantic bass and bluegill, and under the tangled branches of hibernating live oaks.

Row, row, row…

Kneeling on the paddleboard (out of necessity. I was not about to stand and risk falling in the water…) moving with the flow of the river I broke the cold spring silence to tell my story of that wild fever dream I'd conjured up in my unconsciousness; an adventure which was fresh enough in my mind that I could recall most of the finer points and embellish all the rest.

~~~

“My field of view of the world was narrow as if life had condensed itself into the field of view of a paper towel tube periscope. The picture was permanently obfuscated through a thin ephemeral (what's a story if I don't throw in the word "ephemeral?") haze as I staggered from my car into a surgical receiving area of a huge hospital to accept an inevitability that I couldn't escape any longer. Just 10 hours prior, I chose to walk through the doorway of a friend's apartment. If my time was up, I wanted to spend what could have been the last couple of hours on earth with the person behind the door I was knocking on. The apartment entry glimmered an inviting yellow-orange in the setting summer sun as the door opened up. Between sips of castle-temp white wine that tasted of Downeast fog, freedom, and crepuscular beams from a lighthouse in the Atlantic, we laughed and talked in a cozy, warmly lit living room as the lamp light spilled like honey out the 2nd floor windows. Hastily shoved in my backpack was a note I had hastily written. Slightly crumpled, multiple pages in length, trifolded, crafted in my trademark Mandalay Maroon ink from my fountain pen, and laden with information that carried a specific gravity of importance to it; an answer key if you will, it sat idly by. Maybe subconsciously the substances we consumed were an excuse to make the transference of the contents of the letter easier. Maybe the intoxication was a way to diminish the sword of Damocles I was constantly conscious of, but when night rolled to morning and it finally came time to leave, I looked at the trifolded paperwork in my backpack, I shoved it down deep inside, and I left to sleep on the floor of an empty house. I eventually succumbed to sleep; the last night of my life before everything would certainly be changed forever.

When the morning came, because it always does, I tried in an altered state of mind to call an Uber to get to this operation but no one picks you up when you're on the fringes of proper society at 4am on a Tuesday. Having no other good option, I got in my car still feeling the effects of the substances and unsent note from the night before. The long drive to the hospital was executed carefully and exactingly if slightly impaired. But it was a dream and I'm basically a pro at Mario kart in the natural (read: real world) so the skills transferred over. I pulled up to the valet and tossed them the keys to my old car and walked away. Paperwork didn't matter. Tip didn't matter. What happened to the car didn't matter. Over a quarter million miles and those may have been my last ones. I didn't care what they did with it; might not ever see it again. They could hit it with a red shell for all I cared. (That's another Mario kart reference.)

Automated glass doors hinted at a faint golden shine of the dawn while they slid open to reveal a lobby full of people with their palpable anxiety all laid bare in that exposing, cutting, harsh bright white hospital lighting. The low din of conversation in the packed lobby never stopped or got quieter than a murmur. I guess people fear that the silence will usher in doubts or questions and they're not strong enough to stare those things in the face at any hour, much less so at 5am.

I sauntered in, leaned on a wall and waited mostly silently and what I felt was expressionless. The letter was still at the bottom of my backpack… Someone else would find it and know what to do if I didn't make it through, I reasoned. After all, they say that you have no control over who lives, who dies, who tells your story. And by "they" I mean Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Concluding my thought, a young man in a business casual hospital costume popped through a set of secured double doors and called my name. Maybe it was the hangover from the night before or maybe they pump weird air into surgical facilities but from that point I slowly tore away and I was watching my body. I was a spectator and someone else was behind the controls. The hospital liaison man guided me into a room to prep and put on a stupid hospital gown. I placed my Aggie ring, my watch, my camo "America Needs Farmers" hat, and my other valuables in a cheap plastic drawstring bag emblazoned with the hospital's logo, because America. My last real cognizant digital act just before I tossed my phone in the bag was, in a desperate stroke of genius, to schedule a PDF of that letter to be sent via email at 1055. Sure I would be temporarily unconscious or permanently de-conscioused by then, but some things simply can't go unsaid if I wanted to at least try to have control over who tells my story. And if I did indeed wind up waking up dead….how cool would it be to get an email from the other side?! Win for me, win for recipient, win for the afterlife. Win, win, win I confidently thought.

An attendant in white scrubs came in and told me to take my bracelets off. (I have these friendship bracelets that were given to me by very significant and special people and they're a permanent fixture on my wide and well pronounced wrist.) I reluctantly acquiesced and began to take off a silicone wristband off my right wrist with the word “Hope” on it. It broke when I pulled it over my hand.

Could have been a sign… could have been made in China.

“Those need to come off too.”

He was referring to all of those friendship bracelets on my left wrist, and an Era’s tour bracelet that was quite possibly the best gift I'd ever been given.

“No.”

It was a certain type of “no." A matter of fact statement in which everyone who was part of the conversation knew immediately that there was no way in hell or creation that anything would change my decision, be it persuasion, good sense, or blunt force. The bracelets were part of me and they were going to stay, sterile surgical environment be damned. I'd rather run the risk of an 18th century infectious death than cut off the bracelets. I convinced them the Era's bracelet (which had a clasp) was irremovable too. Suckers.

We exchanged disagreeing words at an increasing volume until a nurse came by and told the hospital lackey I was okay leaving them on.

Three or four feet away, separated by a thin curtain was my roommate for the 30 minutes I was in the staging area. I couldn't see them but heard them talk. The words were a jumbled mess and I intentionally tried to not pay attention to the dialogue, but very obviously the person was gripped with fear. I wondered if they were facing a bigger prospect of death than I was looking at, or is it really all the same, big or small?

A chaplain who spoke with what I guessed was a delightful Mozambican accent came in to speak with my roommate, and though I paid no attention to the specifics of the private conversation, that sheer hanging sheet between us did nothing to dampen the stressful tone of concern of the patient and the drone of the preacher. Pastor? Chaplain? Bishop??? Man of God.

The preacher stopped by me on the way out since my bed was the closest to the door. It could have been a sign or it could have been a formality. He tried to engage in conversation with me by asking a multi sequential question like "How are you, Are you calm? Are you religious? Christian?"

I replied with a sincere if half hearted "Yes" paired with an inauthentic smile laced with a smirk because it was all too easy to dodge his interaction. He didn't know I was a career charismatic introvert with an acute capability to eloquently crush an incipient conversation.

He asked me why I seemed so calm, and implied that I must be strong. I was flattered someone had noticed. A large, chiseled, burly preaching man calling you Hercules hits differently than when your mom does it.

"Tell me more about your faith…"

I looked at him as inquisitively as one can when they feel like they're moving above their body watching their life play out extracorporeally. Eyes methodically scanning left and right a few times like a Kit-Cat Klock, I said with a half cocked smile:

"Yes…" as my whole answer. He smiled wide, bright white teeth contrasting against his dark skin. My half smile drifted to a solid three-quarter grin. At that moment a team of 4 people came to take me away.

It was a very mechanical operation, equipment everywhere. Screens, hoses, cords, beeps, an incessant choreographed swarm of nurses and assistants helping helpless people in weird beds who were laid up in their dumb cotton gowns, waiting for someone in scrubs to take them away. Where they all went there’s no way to ever know.

I was wheeled past them all into an operating room. It was cold. Larger than I thought an operating room should be. More cabinet space than I would have guessed. Against the wishes of the attending staff, I transferred myself onto the hard stainless steel table that was sparsely padded. I wasn't dead yet and didn't need the help of these people yet… A nice woman conversed with me in generic pleasantries while she grabbed a large syringe from a package and, mid sentence, stuck the needle deep in my lumbar spine.

Et tu, Brute?

It was a lie when they smiled and said, "you won't feel a thing."

Anesthesia. A spinal epidural catheter placed with a 25 gauge Pencan delivered America's finest tetrocaine and epinephrine straight to my nervous system.

"That wasn't so bad…" I said with a tone of annoyance. My Last words. Maybe ever.

I had to stop talking anyway, though most of my cordialness went out the window when my nurse literally stabbed me in the back. They wanted me unconscious so they could stick an endotracheal tube in me as a means to deliver more anesthetic.

I looked around the room quizzically at the people preparing to dissect me as I was slowly assisted to a supine position on the table. I watched the world begin to turn into the waters of a dark gentle sea. One could call it scary but I thought it was cool. I saw in my fading periphery the glint of a golden door; a sight I had seen before in my life but a sight that didn't belong in an operating room. At the last moment of consciousness I stared hollow-eyed at the kind stranger who was helping me lie down so they could begin to cure or kill me. It was not the woman who stabbed me in the back…I'll never forget that face. It was a different person, kinder, quietly confident, calming. The whole situation was mildly haunting but oddly comfortable. Maybe it was the drugs, maybe there was just no point in worrying…

Though that person was an unknown singularity in a sea of 7 billion, I found something fleetingly familiar in their eyes; big, round, clear, reassuring, wise, and decorated with the most captivating tree bark-textured, cortado-colored irises that I've ever come to know. I was sure I had seen those before somewhere. Spooky…