The Last Time I Died

by Joe Nelms

  There will be no emergency contact to roust from deep slumber so early in the morning. The matter is settled and he relaxes whatever grip he had maintained on his mortal self. Ta da! He is on his way. Finished. Farewell. Bon Voyage.

  If our man could have bowed, he would have.

  15

  White.

  It’s so white.

  Wherever I am is so very white, white, white.

  I may or may not be here. I have no sense of my body. Only my presence. I am everywhere and eternal and also right here condensed into nothing. It is only me.

  And The White.

  There is nothing to see but I know my vision is crystal clear. There is nothing to hear but I know I can perceive the smallest of sounds.

  I have no thoughts beyond pure awareness. Finally. It feels so good. Enough of that other bullshit already. I should have done this a long time ago. The silence here is a thick bath of velvety emptiness that makes me feel clean and soft and even and I never want to leave. I’m breathing life in and out and if you were to touch me your troubles would disappear. I am not hopeful or repentant or anticipatory or nostalgic. I am emotional homeostasis. I’m perfect.

  There is nothing around me. I know that the absence of any light creates black, but the presence of the entire spectrum of light creates white. So maybe there is everything around me.

  The whoosh begins like a breath from a sleeping baby and grows quickly to the wail of a thousand mourning mothers. A tiny object appears on the horizon. It comes fast like the realization of bad news, racing toward me. When it hits me it is infinitely large. Unavoidable.

  It’s a memory.

  A single memory pushing through me, reawakening neural connections I thought cauterized long ago.

  It takes no time to pass through, but I can see everything it contains as it does.

  I recognize my mother immediately. I saw pictures of her after she died. Does anyone ever think their mother is anything but beautiful? I remember nothing of her from my childhood but here, now, I see her and I know it’s her and it feels so comfortable. This is real. 3D. She’s right there. Moving. Breathing. Talking. With that thick black hair tied back and such a skinny waist. Pouring herself another glass of red wine. She is twenty-eight and I am five and there we are in our kitchen and she’s making dinner. I even recognize the smell. She’s tall or maybe that’s my perception as a child. She moves like my sister. Always moving. Always cleaning or stirring something or mixing something. A restrained undercurrent of energy. Same eyes too. Same brown eyes. I bet Ella doesn’t know that. The few pictures she could ever dig up were black and white newspaper reprints. I should tell her. I should tell Ella if I ever see her again.

  —You want some juice, Christian?

  Holy god, her voice. Completely new but familiar like it’s a part of me. I want her to say more but my younger self only nods and she pours me a glass without another word. She’s got a thick Brooklyn accent and when she looked at me I could see sweetness in her eyes. Such a pure moment and neither one of us noticed when it happened.

  I’m coloring at the kitchen table, looking up every few seconds to make sure she’s still there. I hear the neighbor wife bitching at her husband through our open window. It must be a regular thing because we don’t react. The feeling in my five-year-old belly is contentment. It’s a good day. I have no clue what’s coming down the pike only a few years from now. My mother returns to making dinner. My god. She’s gorgeous. My father walks in from outside and pulls a beer out of the refrigerator. Look at this guy. So young and vibrant and not dead inside. They discuss having the neighbors over for dinner and then decide against it with a conspiratorial laugh. A laugh, for Christ’s sake. My father kisses my mother and walks out of the room. For my five-year-old self, this is normal. For my thirty-eight-year-old self, it is astounding. My mother and father together and happy. This is what I have been missing for so long. And it’s been sitting in my head. How did I not do this sooner? Whatever it costs me, it’s worth it. It is wonderful. And then it’s gone.

  I’m out.

  My mother and myself and our kitchen and my father’s footsteps and the tang of Sunday gravy in the air zip by me and I turn my head to follow but it’s moving too fast. The memory is nothing significant and at the same time, it’s everything. My mind is slaked. I had no idea it was this thirsty for knowledge. The void that is my childhood memory has one measly drop refilled. God, this feels amazing. It’s over in an instant, but rich with more information than I can process. My home. My mother. My father. The smells. And then it was gone in the distance, a sliver of a universe that passed through me and left me alone in The White. My mother was beautiful and my father was in love and I was happy.

  What was that?

  I want more.

  Another wail grows behind me only this one is bigger. Plural.

  I turn my attention back around in time to see a tidal wave of memories screaming toward me. There are so many. The whoosh is more powerful this time. A tsunami of memories as tall and wide as I can imagine crashes over me. An explosion of imagery and sound blasts past me. Everything I have ever experienced flying by in bite size chunks, as if my brain is purging itself of the toxins that have poisoned it for so long. Vomiting up a lifetime of memories in an unfathomable volume of moving postcards arranged in no logical order. My first day of school. Driving in traffic. Sneaking out of Foster Parent’s house. Buying groceries. Pouring coffee. Christmas morning. Oversleeping. Lisa’s cunt best friend cornering me at a party to harangue me. Dropping my joint at a concert. Arguing with customer service. Buying a guitar. Riding the subway. Stealing a book. Opening a letter. Sneaking fruit through customs. Parallel parking. Millions of others.

  Millions.

  I want them all. I want to drink them all in. I know each one will taste just as good as the first and I will never be full. If I could grab them I would. But I have no body. I can’t scoop them up and save them all to enjoy one at a time, savoring each long buried moment of my stupid, futile life.

  The stoop.

  Of the countless memories shooting by, one stands out by virtue of the pain associated with it. The memory of the stoop on the townhouse I lived in when I was eight years old. Four steps on the front of our building. The stoop where I would wait for my father to come home from work. The stoop where I played long-lost imaginary games with the neighbor kids while my bored mother watched and smoked. That awful, crumbling stoop that I stared at to avoid the eyes of my neighbors when the cops dragged my father out of our building.

  And there it was. Passing by unaware of its significance to me. I must have it. Maybe I can’t have all of them, but I want this one.

  I focus my mind or whatever I have become on that one memory and manage to slow the streak of images down enough to watch this selected scene like a forgotten home movie unearthed at a relative’s garage sale. I will it closer and demand it to keep playing. It moves toward me and through me and around me and then I’m in it.

  Brooklyn.

  Nineteen eighty-four-ish.

  I was eight.

  I am eight.

  I’m there and I’m eight. Cop cars line the street in front of my building. Red and blue lights flashing. Some cops taking statements from the people who live next door. The neighbor who was always bitching at her husband talks to a uniformed policeman. She was a nosy one and has plenty to say. I’m sure it’s all wrong and she’s making most of it up but who would believe me if I opened my mouth? I can’t hear her anyway. The rest of the neighbors mill around trying to figure out what’s going on. They’re right next to me but they feel like they’re a million miles away.

  I am the only person on earth who feels the way I do. I am an exhibit. This is a zoo and I am the only animal.

  A fat cop wraps a blanket around me and tells me they’re going to take care of me. I understand that I look like I just saw a ghost. I don’t know where my sister is. A female cop is there. She seems disgusted with me. Or maybe she’s
worried. I want to ask her where my sister is and what will happen to us and what are they going to do with my father and when will this end but I don’t because I don’t think she’ll answer. I’m convinced I’ll get into trouble or, worse, she’ll look at me with forced empathy and give me some bullshit, hope-filled answer that both of us know is a lie and then I’ll be confused on top of scared.

  So instead I’m silent as the zoo visitors stare at me. None of them take pictures but that’s only because there’s no way they’ll ever forget this scene. The fat cop talks to the female cop like I’m not there. Like you talk to your daughter while you discuss feeding the monkeys even though the sign says in no uncertain terms not to.

  —He’s been through some shit. CPS is on the way.

  —You know his father’s on the job. Out of the sixth.

  —No shit?

  The fat cop looks back at a commotion coming from the house and I know I should keep looking at the bottom stair of the stoop. Instead I raise my eyes to see the front door of my building open and two New York City Coroner’s office employees wheel out a gurney with a full body bag on it. My stomach sucks itself back to my spine but I can’t look away. I watch the gurney all the way to the coroner’s truck as they slam it into the bumper, collapse the legs, and shove it into the truck’s gaping hole like a sofa being moved to a new apartment. This might be the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen and I can’t figure out why I’m not angry. Neighbors react, some in shock, some with self-righteous acknowledgment, whispering their I-told-you-so’s to each other and pointing across the street. I follow their know-it-all fingers to the cruiser I’ve been trying to not look at. Inside, my father sits, handcuffed from behind, tears streaming down his face. His eyes never leave mine.

  I force myself to stare at my father while the gurney is strapped into the coroner’s truck. When I hear them slam the doors shut, I mouth the words ‘Thank you’ to him as he sits there about to be taken away forever.

  Thank you.

  Finally, he cracks, rolling back against the seat, head flopping back and even through the closed window I can hear him sob.

  And then I look away and find the bottom stair of the awful stoop. The neighbors still watch. They want me to cry. I won’t. Not a tear.

  The sound fades first. Then the colors begin to de-saturate. Soon, there is nothing left.

  Black.

  The memory is gone.

  The White is gone.

  My perfect, dimension-less body has regained weight and density and fatigue and pain and sorrow and regret. The memory storm is over. I am alone in the black with the chilling realization that I might still be alive.

  16

  (Oh my.)

  The old boy gave it his best effort but succeeded only in the pusillanimous achievement of ‘attempted’ suicide. Again.

  Another failure.

  What would Arnold Rosen think? Or Dr. HackShag, for that matter? Or even Dr. Hirsch? Very little, I would guess. Something along the lines of it being a predictable course of action for a person in his condition. Followed by an Oh well or a Such things happen or perhaps even an …Interesting coupled with a stroke of the chin.

  In any event, our man is alive with a cautiously optimistic prognosis of full recovery, which, if he proceeds along a traditional trajectory, will undoubtedly include questions, introspection, honesty, and realizations. Everything the old boy was hoping to avoid.

  As the nurses cluck and the doctors grimace, our man lies in his hospital bed selfishly sucking up the time and energy of a dedicated staff while others embroiled in emergencies not of their own device suffer and call to the heavens to negotiate imaginary deals for their recovery or that of loved ones. The kinds of deals that are generally never heard and rarely honored. The kinds of deals that may not have been necessary were the proper resources available to them rather than having been exploited by our man who was too craven to entertain the idea of discharging a firearm into his mouth.

  What a disappointing awakening our man has ahead of him. Oh yes, he’ll wake up.

  Remember, he failed.

  17

  I’m not in Heaven because there’s a tube in my dick.

  It’s not Hell because the tube would be much larger.

  Fuck.

  I’m alive.

  My eyes creak open. The hospital room is clean and cool and I can’t move a muscle. Exhausted. Tubes in every orifice, not just my Johnson. Machines making beeps that mean something to someone. A pudgy nurse in the process of changing my IV bag. She smiles a beautiful smile that doesn’t belong in a hospital. She must be new. I can see where the wrinkles and bags will be in five years if she lasts that long.

  —Well, hello. We thought we lost you.

  Her words are sweet, but I can tell she’s speeding up the IV swap out so she can run and tell the doctor I’m not brain dead. I wonder who lost money on that one.

  My eyes dart around the room. I’m assuming she’s taking this as a good sign.

  —How are you feeling?

  How am I feeling? My eyes slow to a stop and I drift off into a thousand yard stare. The last thing I need is self-awareness, but now that she’s asked the question I can’t help but assess my current state. I am feeling terrible.

  I’m too tired even to groan. My throat too dry to make any noise if I wanted to. I breathe a little deeper and hope she can translate that to mean that I’m feeling alive, for better or worse.

  They thought they lost me. I was dead. I killed myself. Fucking finally.

  And look what I found. I can see the room around me and I can see this highly trained, doughy woman looking at me like she cares what happens and I can see machines keeping me alive and the mound that is my feet at the end of the bed and the door to my room that’s slightly ajar. But really, wherever I look all I see is the recollection of my lifeflash, the vast mental landscape of unexplored content that I am now aware of, its infinite potential soaking in to my consciousness. Tainting my perception of everything else.

  My life.

  I can see the real world around me, but I am now completely aware of the existence of the reality I thought I had destroyed. It’s in there. All of it.

  One recovered memory plays over and over in a constant loop, as if searching for approval or context or company. I was eight. Staring at the stoop. The night my father killed my mother. My god.

  This is officially my earliest memory. HackShag has lost the title to the brash, young newcomer. Eight-year-old Christian Franco now holds the belt.

  Chubs finishes up with the IV.

  —Okay, you rest now.

  Like I was going to enter the Ironman.

  She scurries out to let the doctors know the good news.

  I’m so tired.

  Black.

  18

  *It’s three years ago.

  I’m standing in one of the ballrooms at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia.

  I’m crying as two hundred Jews stare at me and think either Oh, what a sweet young man or God, what a pussy. Half of them are right.

  I’m crying because I don’t know what’s going to happen next.

  From what I can tell, men look at getting married as the end of a long, arduous process. Celebrating the end of the march of courtship. A culmination. Women look at it as a beginning. The launch party for your new life together. The starting line.

  I’m crying because I don’t know what’s going to happen next.

  I’m crying because I’m trying to remember how I got here and I can’t.

  I’m crying because I drank too much scotch before the ceremony.

  I have no family at the wedding aside from my sister. My choice.

  We’re having a Jewish ceremony. I have no particular religious leanings beyond yelling the name of somebody’s lord and savior when I stub my toe. On the other hand, Lisa was raised in a Jewish household. Orthodox, no less. Observed every holiday. Fasted. No crazy black dresses and wigs, but she went to Hebrew school and was bat mitzvahe
d. She still observed well into our marriage. Made the full spread for Rosh Hashanah every year. Tried to atone every Yom Kippur. Everything. But ask her what happened when you died and she’d tell you there’s nothing. The lights go out. Black.

  It made no difference to her that this one belief sort of negated the whole concept of practicing religion, Jewish or otherwise. If life only leads to black emptiness, how did practicing a religion help anything? It always struck me as pointless, but it was important to her so I said nothing. And now I have to stand here while this overblown donkey of a cantor murders a song I wouldn’t like even if he could sing. It’s endless.

  When I saw Ella before the ceremony, she put on a brave face and wished me the best even though I know she has her doubts. And by doubts, I mean she thinks Lisa would make a delightful ex-fiancée. Ella’s husband shook my hand and handed me another drink right before I walked to the chuppah. His little way of calling me a sucker. I was fine until I saw Ella waddle down the aisle with her maternity bridesmaid dress. How cruel of us, looking back. She didn’t want to be in the wedding in the first place, but Lisa insisted and I bullied. Ella walked down the aisle with as much dignity as she could muster and all I can see is her rotund belly and I’m thinking maybe that will be Lisa one day and won’t that make us whole? I could have held it in if I had kept my eyes closed the entire ceremony. Ella was my trigger.

  I made it a point to have dinner with Ella and Tim as a foursome a few times before the wedding. We had never made the effort before then (also my choice), but I wanted to show off my new toy. This magnificent beast that I had tamed. This mountain I had climbed. Look what I did. I saw this beautiful creature and I snookered her into loving me almost as much as I love her. I broke her. Ella meet Lisa, my new life.

  Ella forced a smile and talked girl talk with Lisa even though I know Ella well enough to understand that she was actually feeling Lisa out. Looking for the weak point. The cracks. Not that she would have ever acted on this intelligence. She knows better than to give me advice.