Phantasmagoria

I wake to a sharp jab to my wrist. Light slices through my cracked eyelids and my surroundings swim into focus. A dark room with a blinding round white light. A door with blurry edges–is it the door that’s blurry or my eyes?--.A man with a pale face dressed in a white coat.

I am surprised to see him yet my body is too sluggish to give a physical reaction. In his hand, a dull plastic tool catches the light. Is that the thing that jabbed me?

The man moves away. I feel a strong urge to follow but a stabbing pain in my abdomen keeps me laying down. I watch as he walks further and further away. I reach out my hand to grab the white coat but my hand closes around nothing. Everything becomes black.

The gleam of his coke bottle glasses behind my eyelids wakes me again. I’m in the same dim room with the same light agitating my sight. His face seems close at first, but his large eyes then gleam from several feet above me. Is he looking down from the ceiling? Or am I falling into the floor?

He’s leaving again. I have to follow. I fight through the pain and stand as my head reels. I stumble forward toward the still-blurry door. The back of his retreating coat is a dirty blond like his hair. Or is his hair as long as his coat?

My feet catch on suddenly uneven ground. I look down and immediately regret it as vomit threatens in my throat. I fight to keep it down. I can’t leave traces.

Why? The thought flees as soon as I question.

The door is open; I stagger through it, trying to keep up with the man. Outside is a hallway with nearly the same features as the room – black with a blinding white light. As I struggle to catch up with the man, he stops and turns as if waiting for me.

“Come.” The man’s pale face disappears, replaced by his hair and coat. Does the coat have fur on it? It seems to shift on its own surface.

We continue on, he at a seemingly breakneck speed and I at an erratic hobble. And yet he never is so far away that I can’t see him.

After hours in the dark hallway, we make it outside to a busy highway. The steady but deafening cacophony of road noise startles my already-dazed senses. The cars’ headlights glint with the same iridescent light as the lamp inside. But there are no cars on the highway, only blurs of refracted light.

Over the noise, I can still hear the man.

“Follow.”

We walk alongside the highway for several miles. At times I can see our silhouettes in the car windows as they rush by. But why are they on the ground and not at eye level? The man stands tall and upright – almost nobly – his smooth, unbroken gait almost gliding through the cityscape. My silhouette is wide and short. I’m hunched over, my head jutting out sideways at an awkward, uncomfortable angle. It shows me more as a jumble of limbs than as a man.

At some point my gaze turns away from both the man and the highway to the buildings on my left. I want to see a clear reflection of myself and of the man in the windows. But even though the windows are dark I still can’t see myself, just an apparently endless void of shadow.

We break away from the highway and pass down a series of empty side streets. The only activity to be heard on them is the distant echo of the highway. Occasionally I see random people walking across the street. But as with the man, I can’t distinguish anyone’s features – just colors or a piece of clothing.

A short couple wearing dull monotone jumpsuits toddles along, huge sunglasses covering most of their faces. A bulky man in a tawny outfit appears fuzzes of white hair escaping from a hat jammed tight on his head. And most bewildering of all, a herd of school children in black cloaks sweep by, chatting and giggling loudly.

As we continue down the streets, gradually the people thin out. Up ahead I can see the edge of town, but it’s not like I had expected. True, there are no more buildings. But outside of town, it isn’t dark and quiet either. Instead, it is blindingly bright and extremely loud. The contrast to the dim cityscape assaults my already dazed perceptive facilities.

My ears start to ring. The abuse to my senses makes me want to turn and run back towards the sanctuary of the dim towering edifices of town. But something in the back of my mind tells me I have to keep going.

I’m losing feeling in my legs; my body seems to be frozen. The tiny bit of mental sharpness I snatched at in the last few hours seems to be fading. The man in the coat grows fuzzy in the distance. The last thing I feel is a shock wave as my body hits the ground, and the world goes black again.

* * *

A siren’s wail pierces the air. Cars pull to the side of the busy highway and a small county ambulance blasts past. Its destination: two state troopers’ vehicles on the right shoulder of the road. The officers themselves are out of their cars, circled with three other civilians in a ditch at the side of the road. All are bending toward the ground. A pair of feet pokes out of the huddle. They speak in serious and troubled tones. As the ambulance draws closer they raise their voices to be heard.

“We pulled over with car trouble and that’s when we saw him.”

“Is he going to die? He looks terribly pale.”

“Judging by his clothes he must have come out of the woods.”

“His shoes are full of mud – how did they get so dirty? It hasn’t rained here in weeks.”

“There’s a river a few miles from here.”

“Look at the state of him though. How could he have walked that far?”

Two emergency personnel quickly exit the back of the ambulance and hurry over to the five people in the ditch. As the troopers step back to let in the newcomers, the owner of the pair of feet can be seen. What the medics notice first is the bloody fabric pressed to his abdomen. The location of the wound suggests organ damage and internal bleeding.

“Keep applying pressure as we get him on the gurney,” commands one of the EMTs to a girl holding what looks to be a spare t-shirt on the man’s wound.

“One, two, three!”

The paramedics lift the man carefully onto the pallet. A few minutes later the ambulance takes off at full tilt towards the hospital. After a few more minutes of talking and writing, the troopers and witnesses leave as well.

From high above there is one witness left. A pale white face and two black, beady, glass-like eyes blinking in the moonlight. Finally, with the flutter of golden brown wings, the barn owl takes off into the night.