The Undiscovered Country

         The Undiscovered Country

        There was no tunnel, no welcoming bright light, no guiding force; nothing like that at all.  In fact, the whole experience was very eerie, unpleasant. 
         The initial sensation wasn’t like waking up so much as fading in; the last things he remembered were the sound of ambulances, and Dan, who he’d been eating lunch with, squatting over him in a lumber jacket and hard hat, telling him in a gruff male voice that sounded wrong for the sentiment, that everything would be alright.  Then he was fading in to the bright lights of a hospital operating room, filled with shiny chrome and aluminum furnishings, mint-green staff, the buzzing of fluorescents just above his head, beeping of machinery below, low voices of the doctors, acrid stench of sterility.  The room slowly focused and he could see that it was indeed him on the operating table, covered in a mint sheet to match the doctors’ scrubs, and spattered with blood.  The frantic movements below told him that he wasn’t doing too well.
         It seemed cliché to be hovering there.  He expected the tunnel next and the bright light, perhaps a heavenly hand or an angel. 
         A more frenzied beeping sounded and the doctors’ voices and movements became more intense.  Sure enough, James began to float up through the ceiling.  The last thing he heard clearly was the young voice of a doctor saying “Stat!”, just like in ER. 
         The space between floors was dark, musty, and filled with a muffled clang.  Then he emerged, now standing, in a corridor the next floor up.  He was no longer in the hospital; this corridor was part of a dusty old house.  Dark wood paneling rose half way up the impossibly high walls, lined with a darker wood trim above his head and dimly glowing torches.  The upper parts of the walls were painted forest green and rose so high that the glow of the torches faded before illuminating the ceiling, so that that the walls rose into oblivion.
         The floor of the corridor was dark, too, perhaps mahogany, and, knowing that behind him was merely a door through which he could not pass, James started following it forward. 
         About halfway along, he came to a high, narrow wood door on the right side.  He had to pass through this door, but what lay on the other side would disturb him greatly.  He put a hand on the icy doorknob, about chest level, and leaned in to press his ear against the wood.  Scratching and tapping, like a tree bough brushing the other side of the door, and beyond that, very faintly, weeping.  The knob grew icier and the scratching and tapping grew more intense, as if the tree had grown and the wind had picked up; James turned the knob and swung the door inwards to winter coldness and utter darkness.
         Utter darkness: the dim light from the hall did not even offer an inch of illumination.  James stepped through the doorway and onto the damp soil on the other side.  He took two steps forward and let the doorknob behind him slip out of his fingertips.  He didn’t need to turn around to know that the instant he released the frigid metal, the doorway, door, and corridor were gone. 
         He was standing in an infinite expanse of complete darkness, the chill penetrating to his heart. 
         The weeping continued, slightly more audible but seemingly high above.  He shuffled forward on the pungent earthy ground until his shins rapped against something roughly coffee-table height.  James dropped his knees onto the frigid ground.  Still blind with the total absence of light, he attempted to explore the object with his numb hands.  He could only determine that the object was about six feet long and a foot-and-a-half wide.  His grandmother was inside.
         When she was dying, his grandmother had been moved to an intensive care facility two blocks from his apartment, but James had only been there once, long enough to wheel her in and then run away.  He couldn’t bear the place, its halls and rooms filled with death, the sagging-skinned, toothless aged residents in their wheelchairs and Depends, hands like talons, mildewed stale breath wheezing in and out of their sunken chests, looking through him with dim, watery eyes, and the antiseptic smell ineffectively masking the reek of urine and rot. 
         So he had left her completely alone, to spend the last moments of her eighty-eight years with nothing but the daily routine care for the debilitated and the unfulfilled hope that she could feel love one last time.  Granny, who had survived bombings in Warsaw, a six-month boat journey with two infants, and a new home where nobody understood a single word of her language; Granny, who had spent sixty years cooking, scrubbing, laundering, shopping, mending for first children, then grandchildren, then finally only Grampa.  Granny, who had been visited and thought of less and less frequently in these, her final years, the years when she needed rather than provided. 
         James had been the one person from her life who had the proximity and the means to fill her last moments with love and meaning, and instead he had left her to gasp her last cold breaths of air on this world lonely and closed and void of contact.
         She wept above him.  He shivered in the frozen air, listening to the sound of her final emotion, the feelings she died with.  He had never felt guilt until this moment.  Was this hell?  Forever suffering the guilt of his most selfish act on earth?
         He could see a dim halo of light in the distance, but it was still not the tunnel and the welcoming light to the everafter.  He rose, the coffin gone, and walked toward the red glow.  The air was warming, and the glow was spreading, enveloping him.  He was suspended in protective warmth, with nothing to see but the dim redness all around him and nothing to hear but the muted thu-thump thu-thump thu-thump of his mother’s heart beat. 
         You're kidding, he thought to whatever higher power was punishing him thus.  This wasn't something to be ashamed about, to feel guilty about.
         Carrie Ann Spears – his first girlfriend, age sixteen.  He had convinced her that if she loved him she would fill his needs.  Later he had convinced her that the two of them would be terrible parents.  Her overwhelming sense of eternal loss, annihilation, that he now finally comprehended was stronger than his fear that this would be his everlasting penalty.  It wasn't the abortion that he felt guilty about, it was getting her into that position in the first place.  And there was no higher power giving him these guilts; they were coming from some inside place, where they'd been decaying, ignored.
         Something jabbed into his warmth, penetrated the safety to swathe him in his first-ever agony, and he fell out of the womb in a gush of red fluid.  The fetus had died at this point, but James was not so lucky. 
         Another light beckoned him, again not the one at the end of the tunnel.  Still, slipping on the viscous puddle, he managed to get to his feet.  He was naked from the expulsion, wet, bloodied, with creamy globules stuck in his hair.  Cold again, and the lighted portal growing in front of him did not lead to warmth. 
         Still, he had no choice but to walk towards it, taking small, careful steps on the slippery ground. 
         This was a window, a window into the future, where he could see down onto a never-ending city of festering filth; a city piled with the garbage and rubble of too many people and not enough care.  A dead city, inhabited only by the microbes and cockroaches that could withstand anything. 
         This view of the future, his future, told him that he would live; the tunnel, the light, the beckoning hand of God, would not come until much later.  He was receiving a few more decades. 
        But the years to come would be different.  Till now, he had been selfish, greedy James, gobbling up every beautiful thing given to him with ravenous shredding teeth, tasting nothing.  Hell was going back to undo the damage he’d done so far, and try to make the rest of it count for something.
         The window dissolved into fluorescent lights, and a steady machine whine separated into bleeps as James found himself gasping for air in the ER room. 
         There was a sweaty, frantic feel to the room, and he heard a doctor, standing just above him holding paddles in both hands, say “He’s back, we got him.”  Steady bleeping to his left, a collective exhale of relief around him.  A beautifully dark-eyed nurse put a triangle of plastic over his nose and he could breathe.  He closed his eyes.