reathe,” Veronica’s echo came to him. “Breathe, honey.”

Vincent needed the reminder. Where he was was deep and perilous. Where he was was the innards of misdirection, the subterrain of desperation. Vincent was so far within himself his body became the atmosphere, encasing his energy. Without action he tunneled down into himself in search of his core, seeking discovery in the black. What he found was soot and ash and a hollow hum that reverberated Veronica’s request.

Breathe.

Vincent swam to his surface. Light, the sun, disappointment, glinted through the smeared orange of his fleshy eyelids. This should be his return home, but it isn’t. Coming back to where you were does not constitute a return home. Sometimes it’s regression. If where you’re going isn’t an improvement, even if it’s what is known and familiar, well, you call that a relapse.

“That’s it,” Veronica’s hot hand cradled his jaw line. “We’re back here now.”

Feeling returned. Vision was restored. Awareness seeped back in. Where Vincent was was nothing, an environment of suspended dimension and sensation, but then there was the cool, sticky tile, the knotting in his neck, pants tangled at his feet, and Veronica, her head giant through his bleary eyes, tears turning his retinas into binoculars. Her presence was terrifying.

“Agh,” Vincent grumbled, his horror muted by his incapacitation. “Aaaaaaaaaah.”

“Easy baby,” Veronica’s monster head bellowed. Her whisper flushed his cheek with the force of gale winds, the decibel of her sound drowning the ringing inside his ears.

“Easy,” she repeated.

Vincent commanded himself to struggle, to resist her assistance, but what was managed was a mild twitch. His legs gently thudded on the tile, weak in their protest. Furious and still, Vincent summoned his larynx to repel Veronica’s misguided care.

“Get,” he stammered, spitting blood and calcium. “Get away.”

Then exhaustion. His head tilted to find the toilet nearby, the bathtub behind him. The ceiling was tall and impossible, a peeling, mildewed heaven limiting Vincent’s potential ascent. The mountain of the sink stood regal by his legs, its concealed insides veined with grouted pipes. The sun of the vanity lights required Vincent to squint, unable to digest it’s visual assault. The whole bathroom framed him, limited him, partitioned him to his state of immobility, and it seemed Veronica was present to ensure this.

“Angie, call 911!” Veronica’s boom rattled back inside Vincent’s brain like God playing his eardrums. “Hurry!”

Alarm gripped Vincent. The air sat on his bare torso, the product of the ventilation system frigid against his skin, his visible skin from his sternum to his knees and nothing else. He shivered as sweat cut a river down his neck. Veronica’s finger sampled the perspiration.

“He’s baking himself!” she thundered.

And like suction Vincent went back inside, withdrawing himself. Plummeting in a free fall he returned inside, down past his larynx and lungs, beneath his stomach and spirit, bypassing his soul until there was nothing. Until sleep was looming and imminent, promising and welcome. Until the heft of life was alleviated. Where Vincent was there was no desire to struggle, no need for motion, only instantaneous tranquility. That heroin rush for all eternity. That mescaline harmony forever. That MDMA happiness altogether from here on out.

“Vincent!” Veronica yelled, elsewhere. “Vincent get back here!”

A slap at his surface corrupted the oasis and Vincent’s location was back on the cool, sticky tile puddling with blood and sweat. In the doorway was Angie, her eyes shrunk and wrinkled from sleep, veiled in fear and confusion. Her hands gripped the edges of the doorway as Vincent lied three-fourths naked on the floor, Veronica cradling his head, rocking. Nude, aching, protesting, Vincent was being born again.

“Vincent, you have to stay here with me,” Veronica’s sound was quieter, shook by tremors. “Vincent, you’ve been out for hours.”

None of this meant much to Vincent. Where he wanted to go he wasn’t allowed. He wanted to go back inside. Back to the serenity. But he could not. His body tethered him to the reality of Veronica and Angie and the cool, sticky tile. Veronica, in another life, in another time, loved Vincent. Angie, in a different era, was a lovely sister. Here they tower overhead in their superiority, justified by righteous intentions, unaware how selfish they’re being trying to revive him.

“The ambulance is coming,” Angie stammered.

The hospital is the morgue. The hospital is where they’ll attach an IV and run fluids and provide sedation and nurture Vincent back to health. Doing so would kill him. Classical healing would terminate Vincent. Veronica didn’t see it because she was blinded by her want. Angie couldn’t hear it because the melody of affection lulled her into stupor. What Vincent wanted, what Vincent needed, was this natural escape. This natural progression back within himself where there was calm.

“Oh God, are those his teeth?” Angie pointed to splinters of calcium on Vincent’s shirt.

“Don’t look in the trash,” Veronica warned suggestively.

Of course Angie looked and found half of Vincent’s tongue, the half he bit off when he dove into the edge of the bathtub. Nestled between tissues, the tongue, Vincent’s tongue, was purple, dead. The horror that was Vincent lay still and mangled on the cool, sticky tile. Angie’s abrasive face of nausea was probably an accurate mirror of how Vincent looked. His nose now angled left, flat, flush against his face, blood graphittied on his cheeks and chin, where it was thickest. Within the cavern of his mouth hung incisive stalactites, one poking through his crusted bottom lip.

“We need to get him up,” Veronica concluded, rising off her knees into a squat.

“No,” Angie countered, reluctant to come any closer. “I mean, shouldn’t we keep him still?”

“He’s sauteeing, Angie” Veronica growled. “We need to get him into the shower before he melts.”

Veronica heaved Vincent from the tile, her forearms forklifting him up at the armpits. Angie straddled his legs, raising them by the ankles until Vincent’s body was one long, half-naked crescent moon shuffling towards the tub. His back banged against the wall of the tub before Angie could lift his legs enough to clear it. Veronica strained to prop his head along the wall, focused on his consciousness while the churning waterfall from the spout thundered down inside the tub.

Vincent was dead weight. The motion jolted his stasis, jarring his fluids and balance until a hot rush swarmed his mind and things went white. Things went white and then they cleared, Veronica’s head big and loud again. Then white. White for what was not long enough, white and clear and complete for what seemed like only a moment, then wet focus again as frigid shower water rained down on him.

“They’re here,” Angie squealed, spinning down the hall to the living room. Veronica came down to Vincent, her head drenched in the downpour, and kissed him on the forehead. She clutched his cheeks and her eyes moistened, moistened from the shower and not emotion. They fell hard on Vincent.

“You make me crazy, you sonofabitch,” she said, calm. “And if you die you deserve it.”

Then came the cavalry. A short brunette woman came to Vincent’s head, sending the beam from her pocket flashlight into his corneas, her gloved fingers suspending his eyelids. Her tall colleague entered at half-speed, fatigue and indifference wearing his face. He shut off the water while the brunette clocked Vincent’s pulse.

“What did he ingest?” she asked, studying her watch, as if inquiring about the weather. No emotion, no concern about the waning human life, the precious commodity of feeling and sentiment and complex thought that could cease here at any moment. Only objective interrogation seeking quantifiable answers.

“75 milligrams alpha-methyltryptamine and an indiscernible quantity of gamma hydroxybutyrate,” Veronica recited, awaiting some sort of reaction from the medics. None was provided.

“How long ago?” the brunette inquired in her monotone.

“Four, five hours.”

“Sounds like quite a night. What happened here?” the brunette’s index finger suggested Vincent’s teeth.

“We, uh,” Veronica’s eyes come down to Vincent’s exposed midsection, then to his sister in the doorway. “We were, um, in here, and then I, I went out into the bedroom to turn on the TV when he crashed into the tub.”

“Was he unconscious when you found him?”

“Yes,” Veronica said. “Intermittently.”

Her efforts at professionalism went unappreciated by the medics. Like the toxicology tests weren’t going to show anyone who cared how many narcotics were in Vincent’s body. It’s all irrelevant now, the hurricane having already run amok. The devastation had been employed, and what remained was the cleanup. Nasal reconstruction. Cosmetic dental work. Counseling. Therapy. Rehab. All the things that would inevitably prove to be consequences if Vincent could just get his body temp to drop.

The brunette pulled off a latex glove and put her knuckles to his forehead. Her eyes darted to her tall colleague standing at the other end of the tub. He immediately left the bathroom.

“What?” Veronica asked, her pitch escalating. “What is it?”

“Severe hyperthermia, dear,” the brunette deadpaned. “He’s incinerating himself.”

“Well turn the shower back on!” Veronica started fooling with the knobs.

“And he’s dehydrated,” the brunette reached over to halt the water. “He needs a drip and full-scale medical attention.” She paused as a thought sprinted through her mind. “That is, if you want him to live.”

The tall man returned with a folded-up gurney. Angie made way by putting her hands over her mouth. Veronica attempted a counter-protest, but stopped short. The brunette stooped down to pull Vincent out of the tub, the tall medic at his feet, and then they stopped too.

Vincent was limp, then kinetic. His body convulsed violently for seconds, then halted, quivered momentarily, then still. His eyes went white. The brunette hesitated, then bent back down to grab him. They hefted him onto the gurney, Veronica dropping a towel over his bare, wet midsection.

Vincent saw none of this. Where Vincent was was somewhere else. There was nothing tangible, nothing felt. It wasn’t as much depth and breadth as it was intensity. The black was so thick. It wasn’t as quiet as it was serene, the indistinct white noise his slowing pulse, his labored breathing. There was no tunnel, no room, no beckoning white light. All that remained of Vincent was his desire.

“Unit 387,” the brunette ordered into her walkie talkie, “ETA eleven minutes. Possible AMT/GHB overdose. Victim unresponsive.”

The body doesn’t expire instantaneously. During its shut-down procedures the mind occupies itself in this void, this vast completeness where Vincent had found himself. It’s probably here where people see their lives rewind. This is what’s natural. In an inexplicable new environment, it’s human tendancy to search the archives for something to identify this. To assign some sort of recognition. The mind scours itself for similarities, flipping back through the pages of life looking for what it swears it remembers. Back back back back through it all, through everything, until it closes the front cover and remembers when this happened before. At the beginning. In the womb. Where it was black and there was harmony.

“We’ve still got a beat,” the brunette said to whomever, wheeling Vincent down the stairs to the parking lot.

The running ambulance sat idle in the cold, gray exhaust flickering out the tail pipe. Vincent’s body rustled when the wheels of the gurney folded up as it slid into the vehicle. A thick needle penetrated a vein in his hand and then coolness flooded his arm. The ambulance rocked as more people climbed aboard, Veronica and the brunette in the back alongside Vincent.

The cold river in his arm tapered off. The motion and bounce of the truck over speed bumps was no longer noticeable. Vincent was deep, embedded now. Distant was the world and her rules. Her laws of behavior and thresholds of life. Far not in distance, but in desire. Vincent craved life no more, and though the possibility of resuscitation sat beside him, he chose not to pursue it. The one constant, Vincent realized, was the option of choice.

Outside, in the other world, a machine cursor flatlined.

“Vincent?” Veronica asked, curious.

The brunette pumped on his chest. The ambulance shuddered, moved by the imperfections of the road upon which it drove. The brunette administered mouth-to-mouth, then pumped more on his chest. The scream of the machine was constant and loud, a pronunciation of peril. Vincent laid as motionless as before.

But inside he was still there, momentarily. Inside he was locking up, making sure all the lights were off, the oven was shut down, the fires extinguished. Inside he found himself, found his persona, and he embraced it. It was everything he had sought but never found. It was the identity that he was forever unable to define. It was that primitive, instinctive blueprint of himself he had left behind in the birth canal, before sight and sound and feeling and emotion diluted his integrity.

Coming back to where you were does not constitute a return home. Sometimes it’s regression. If where you’re going isn’t an improvement, even if it’s what is known and familiar, well, you call that a relapse. Understanding this, finished and content, Vincent was home. He had finally returned.

 

[END]

© 2004 Bryan Meckley - Contributor's Bio