The 4th Day of Christmas

***
On this fourth day of Christmas our almost three year old was playing with her favorite Christmas present, a Sesame Street playdoh color mixing machine, while standing in her tower at the kitchen island. She was also eating breakfast which was a glass of ice water and a small bowl of cut up sausage pieces.

At some point I looked up from my coffee and saw her using the small playdoh dipping spoon to transfer small amounts of water to her mouth, à la Orthodox Communion.  "Hey Anya, you look like you're taking Communion."

This triggered a huge grin and what appeared to be an actual sparkle in her eye. She picked up the glass and gave it a big kiss. "I kiss da cup," she giggled. She then put a piece of the sausage in her mouth. "I eat da bread."

Elias and I looked at each other and started laughing. High on her imagination and energized by our response she proclaimed in a loud voice, "I take cu-moony-yum!"
***

Children’s Classics

Poppyseed has discovered classic children's poems and songs on her mother's iPhone. For the past several days I have found her listening to them or singing snippets around the house. Today I caught "Peter, Peter, pumpkin eater..." coming from the front room. I later went to investigate and as I turned the corner I was greeted with "Pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been?"

It's strange how technology is shaping the way we ingest information these days. I can remember these exact same poems and songs in our Childcraft books growing up. I can perfectly picture the illustration for "Fishy, fishy, in the brook..." as well as others that really caught my eye and stoked my imagination. The other source of these children's classics as a kid was the record player with it's quarter-sized plastic adaptor for playing 45's.

I'd recently opined that Poppyseed knew more pop music references than those poems and songs passed down through the generations. Now it appears that she is making up for lost time on a smart phone. And now that I'm living in the new millennia I think I'm going to go on line and find those books on Amazon. Poppyseed's birthday will be here before we know it.

***

Ol' Roy

Untitled, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

***
It's raining
in December

Ol' Roy
hangs on
our tree
these past
ten Christmas's

painted before
kids came

A young
married couple
far from
their roots
in the
Mid West

He was
my grandpa
and he
loved trains

Still feeling
the thrill
of his
room-sized
train set

A six
year old
boy with
engineer's cap

shoebox-sized
train cars
powered by
electrified rails

A connection
that gets
more precious
with time

***

A Full Moon

St. Elias, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

***

My son lies
in a darkened room
the lights out
sleeping
as I stand
over his bed.
I can see him
in the cold glow
of a full moon
its reflected rays
slanting through
his bedroom window.
Three fingers together
two drawn downward
making the sign
of the cross
reciting
a paschal hymn
a psalm of protection.
Let God arise
let his enemies
be scattered.
Let those
who fear Him
flee before
His face.

***

The Desert

Watching the Mud Dry #1, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

***
Still haven't figured out this writing journal thing. I've always waited for inspiration in order to write and having some direction has always made writing easier. Writing w/o direction or inspiration, now that's a different story. When there is no excitement to fuel the writing it becomes a vast desert of unexplored territory. And what to explore? Sand? Cacti? The occasional boulder?

Writing seems to be pure magic. When I can't do it I wonder at those who can. When I am writing and it is going fairly well I wonder at where all of this information is coming from and how I am able to make sense of it all. I've also learned that I'm a sucker for alliteration and it comes up frequently when I write. So much so that I have to edit it out sometimes because it can get comical when I'm not trying to be funny. "The conniving clown cut cautiously on his crusty carbuncle." See what I mean?

At present I am trying to write a story about a crow I killed when I was a kid. I sense there is something powerful and disturbing in this story. I feel a need to write it out, to think it through, and come out on the other end with some new insight into myself. I love the idea of writing as self-therapy. I was made aware of this facet of writing when I was taking pictures and writing poems during a deployment to Iraq. It was so desolate there with no escape to familiar places or a recourse to well known faces. Sitting in my little concrete room at night I could handle the fear, the tedium, and the loneliness by writing a poem and pairing it with a picture.

Another recent example was starting with the idea of "I remember when" which led to memories of visits to a laundromat in the small town I grew up in. When we first moved there I was starting first grade and we were renting a house while waiting for our house to be built on the edge of town. The rental house, I later learned from my Mom, had no washer and dryer and that is why we were visiting the laundromat that first year or so. In writing down that little walk down memory lane I was able to gain a greater appreciation for my Mom. Our relationship was pretty bumpy growing up and looking at this one little bit of our lives by writing about it as an adult brought some understanding and healing with it.

So writing *is* powerful, but you gotta put down the words and spelunk the brain. That's what this journal is all about and this is my second entry, Hurray!
***

"Hallelujah"

***

If we only knew
the gravity of grace
that sustains all that is
and all that could be
working in and through us

one word would repeat
in an endless loop
of joy and love
transforming our suffering
into hope and thanksgiving.

***

The Door

"How are you feeling today?"

is the door
through which
the doctor steps.
Some answer, some don't,
some can't, and some won't.
A trickle may come
that is encouraged to flow.
A flood may result
and cover the floor,
two people bobbing
on words and emotions.
He provides an anchor, an oar,
a will to be present.
Whatever happens,
he must never be distant.
Above all else
it must remain open.
But if it is slammed shut,
he will wait patiently
on the other side.

***

Uncle Bob and the Baltimore Ravens

Uncle Bob and the Baltimore Ravens, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

Grabbed my Baltimore Ravens cap as I headed out the door to return my son's books to the library today. I've not worn it out and about before, but today seemed a good time to do so. The trees are in full Fall regalia and the sun is shining down with a cool breeze blowing.

I am not a Ravens fan nor do I know any Ravens fans in the circles I run in here in the Midwest. I've heard that someone on that team had been involved in a stabbing years ago and "got away with it." I don't know much about it, but what I do know is my Great Uncle Bob lived in Baltimore and was a Ravens fan, a mellow man with a sweet spirit.

His sister is my grandma who passed away a few years ago. Their brothers died much earlier in a run of heart attacks due to bad genes and even worse eating habits. I remember those brothers only from foggy childhood memories of a family reunion or two, especially Uncle Charlie who was a real character and had a humdinger of a son named Chuckie whose antics have gone down in family legend.

Several years ago I visited a residency program in Washington DC as a fourth year medical student and Uncle Bob invited me up to Baltimore for breakfast at an old fashioned diner. I remember enjoying pancakes and coffee as well as his quick smile and uncanny resemblance to my grandma who was still alive at that time. When my wife and I moved to DC we visited him and Aunt Stephanie and later brought along our new little boy who was born there.

This past summer we went down to see my family in Southern Indiana. While we were there my Mom remembered that Aunt Stephanie had sent some of Uncle Bob's ball caps for family to have as mementos of his passing this year. My Dad brought down a shoe box full of them from the closet shelf and I went through them one by one. Many had golf themes which was a passion of Uncle Bob's though it is a sport I've never really gotten in to. Somewhere in the middle of the pack I found the Baltimore Ravens hat, a team that had just won the Super Bowl.

So, today I am remembering Uncle Bob in this beautiful twilight time of the year as the days begin to shorten. The leaves are starting to die, but not without an explosion of color to ease their passing in winning fashion.

Sibling Snuggles

***

There are two of them,
a boy and a girl,
six years apart.
There is no comparing,
it's apples and oranges
(I like it that way).

***

Starting a Writing Journal

I'd love to learn to write better, but my inclination is to take a picture instead., a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

10/30/13

What does one write in a writing journal? If what I've read is to be believed, you write about anything as long as you keep writing. So here I am, writing. I'm tapping away in a Panera Bread where I have not purchased anything, but inhabit a booth like a literary freeloader. In all truth I'm afraid to write. I see people write long stories or blog posts that go on and on and on, and I wonder, "where do all of those words come from? Why can't I just write and write and write?" My brain is always striving to be concise and say as little as possible to convey the idea or image I am trying to get across.

OK, see, here it is again. I stopped, looked around, and now I'm forcing myself to tap on keys again. I have started a journal like this a few times in the past and it never gets past one entry and that entry is terrible, so self conscious, so contrived, so dadgummed forced that I never want to try it again. But here I am, tap, tap, tap. You can't get from A to B by hanging around A and complaining how hard it is. Where will that novel come from? Where will those short stories wrung from life come from full bloom? I guess by doing this writing practice thingy.

And now, almost as soon as I've started, I'm finished. Family duties call and there is no spiriting myself away to some beautiful isolated locale to create imaginary worlds and revel in what amounts to self-therapy. At least this entry got made. I've gotta be happy with that, I guess.

The Protector of Children

The Protector of Children, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

*****

"I watch for cars when the kids are going over to Sunday School."  As he says this he looks left at a car coming around the corner.  When it sees him squatting there in the mouth of the alleyway on the narrow street, it slows down.

*****

Enough to Be on Your Way

Kevin Remembered, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

Tonight I was washing dishes and listening to James Taylor while the kids showered upstairs. The song I had on rotation was “Enough to Be on Your Way.” It is a favorite of mine and never fails to bring back memories of Kevin McCarty.

I bought the CD when it came out in 1997 and was so impressed by it that I took it with me to visit Kevin in his studio apartment in Marion, Indiana. We listened to this song in particular and when it was over I noticed Kevin had a funny grin on his face. “Man,” he said, “no one can sing the “F” word and make it sound beautiful like James Taylor. “

Kevin was tall and lanky like JT and I've often imagined that if his skull hadn’t been malformed by the radiation treatments he’d received as a child for retinoblastoma he would have looked very much like him.


So long, old pal.

A Visit with St. John of San Francisco

A Visit with St. John of San Francisco, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

The melodic drone of chant
fills the immense church as
darkly translucent icons sway
in the flickering candle light.
To one side sits a glass-topped box
under a carved wooden canopy.
St. John is sleeping there,
more awake than awake.
His dry and boney hands
lay crossed over his midriff.
A bishop's crown is on his head.
A cloth covers his face,
not out of fear,
but as a function of mystery.
His experience transcends the flesh,
no longer limited to five senses,
no longer bound by space or time.
He hears prayers
whispered in earnest,
ever the pastor,
connected to all
through faith and love.
I draw near.

"Hello, I'd like to report a parenting problem."

I yelled at a kid today and I'm not proud of it. Sure, he's bigger than my son but how much bigger than him am I? He's a bit of a bully and I bullied him good in what feels like a hollow victory. What did he do? He took my son's bike and when my son asked for it back (five times) he acted as if he couldn't hear my son who was jogging alongside of him.

Deep emotions from my childhood welled up, a neighborhood boy very much like this one who did what he pleased b/c he was bigger than me. I yelled his name to stop him in his tracks and told him (in a very loud voice) that when someone asks for something back that is theirs, you give it back to them, plain and simple.

It had the desired effect, but it kind of threw my son off, hearing me yell like that. My wife heard and was not comfortable with what I'd done. It's not easy being a parent: rational, calm, measured in words and wise in actions. Maybe kids like that are around to teach us patience and force us to find solutions to problems that do not involve violence, verbal or otherwise. I'm still learning.


***

The Skeleton Remains

***************
The mirror sits as it always does, cold, flat, indifferent, impossibly shiny. He looks intently at the reflection there, absent-mindedly drawn to the dark round hole of his left nostril. It looks blacker than the right one, a portal of some sort, a cave, a tunnel, whatever, and the longer he stares, the bigger it grows.

Once its dark diameter has reached the size of his face, he grabs the skin folds on either side and in one quick motion pulls it back over his head, like the hood of a sweatshirt, revealing his skull underneath. Its toothy grin confronts him as he rotates his head slowly, taking it in from different angles.

“This is what I’ll leave behind one day, a cicada shell on a tree,” or so his thoughts go. The image seems natural to him, removing some of the horror.  A blink of his eyes and things return as they were: a slow march to the grave with decisions to be made about how that time should best be spent.

***************

The Laundromat

1976, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

I remember the laundromat that my mother used to take me to when I was a child.

It sat on the north side of the town square sandwiched between two other businesses: a little girl dress shop called "Sugar and Spice" and a Realtor's office, if memory serves. The front of the laundromat looked like a giant multi-glass-paned garage door that could open up its entirety to the outside when raised. The ceiling was almost two stories high which made for a massive cube of space ringed by dryers. Washing machines occupied the center with at least two large folding tables. Scattered about were wheeled metal laundry baskets, each with a suspended bar for hangers.

The drone of the dryers and wumping of the washers made it a very noisy place. The smell of laundry detergent and an oppressive heat surrounded you, but it was something peculiar, different from home.

I loved getting the change from my mother to put in the detergent dispensing machine, hearing the clink of the falling quarters, three in a row, and then getting a firm grip on the rounded handle and pulling back with a hard tug until it stopped and a small brightly colored box of detergent thudded into the tray. Further satisfaction came from releasing it quickly so that it returned with a loud metallic clack. These little boxes were like toys and once they were emptied they could be used to play basketball with the laundry baskets as well as kicked, whacked, or thrown.

At night the well lit interior threw bucketfuls of light out onto the darkened square creating elongated shadows of the swings and slide situated across the street on the square proper. Red and yellow points of light from circling cars winked like fireflies.

I remember my mother always wearing a dress, beehive hairdo, no make up, and a bit of a scowl on her face. I was always testing her limits, making it difficult for her to relax or just be able to do what she needed to do with a minimal amount of hassle. My older sister was there too, maybe nine to my seven, as well as my younger sister who was just a toddler. Those two were manageable, compliant to some degree, the older looking out for the younger.

I, on the other hand, was trying to climb into carts or disappear into dryer holes. If my mother had her back turned for too long while folding clothes, I was outside seeing how far I could get down the sidewalk before being ordered back and scolded.  I've seen that scowl on my wife's face, trying to deal with our sometimes unruly and rambunctious son.  I'm sure that scowl has been on my face, seen in my son's expression like a mirror, his nose scrunched up in anger.

Almost forty years later and with a seven year old son of my own, I am just now able to feel the full weight of sympathy for this mother of three laundering our clothes in a small Midwestern town on a hot summer's night.

Three Blind Mice

Muir Woods, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

The slightly-edited story below is one I wrote when I was a college student in the early '90s. The idea for it came from a story one of my professors told us about his experience in standing before a panel of academics when he was defending his doctoral thesis. The tone of his experience transferred itself into the characters as described below. Revisiting this story so many years later, I find it striking how true to my subsequent experience it has been, though my understanding of things now is very different from then. It is like this story suggested a trajectory that my thoughts were eventually to follow.
______________________________


Three Blind Mice
(have you ever seen such a thing in your life?)


Being a young twenty something is not unlike being lost in a foreign land only to discover it is the place you were born.

College had presented me with a paradox by broadening my horizons while at the same time trapping me in a water-filled globe of unreality. With a shake of my head, philosophies and world-views would swirl around like bits of artificial snow in my mind. I believed that I had to have all of the "big questions", and assorted smaller ones, answered in order to successfully move on with my life. There was never a sense I'd read enough books or taken enough of the right classes. For the first time in my life I felt utterly lost and set adrift. Disappearing into the rear distance was the security of home and looking ahead there was only open water with no land in sight. Who knew what sharks plied these waters. How does one navigate by the stars? Accompanied by these thoughts, I entered a forest.

***

Almost immediately I felt some of the caffeine fueled angst begin to abate under the canopy of leaves. This reprieve did not last long as I eventually became aware of a change, something subtle, but making me feel uneasy and unsure of myself once again. A quick survey of the area turned up nothing unusual which only proved to intensify my confusion. Thinking that it was just the effects of weariness I rubbed my eyes. With my eyes closed my ears picked up the incongruity immediately. The routine sounds of the forest had completely ceased, an unnatural stillness, dead quiet.

A headwind caught me unawares and sent shivers up my spine. It carried with it noises that were strangely inexplicable. Tinkling sounds, like tiny metallic wind chimes, were accompanied by murmurings and intermittent shouts. Apprehensive, but also curious, I continued moving towards the source.

This brought me to within sight of a clearing from where the sounds appeared to originate. Creeping along in a clandestine manner, I found concealment behind a tree near its edge. The grass was a sickly hue beneath me diffusing into a dead grayness inside the circle of trees. The noises were distinct now and sounded very much like an argument in progress. I cautiously peeked around the tree and took in a sight most unforgettably bizarre.

In the center of the clearing there were three immense books, like paper-made pillars of varying height, but all much taller than I. Upon each sat an old man in grey-black tasseled robes faded with time and the elements. Arcane academic badges hung from their chests and jingled in the wind. They were caught up in some disagreement and were not aware of my presence. This gave me the courage to move in a bit closer to observe them in better proximity. From this greater vantage point I was startled to discover that they were all quite blind.

***

The old scholar in the middle sat perched upon the tallest book and looked to be the eldest of the three. His eyes moved about as he talked but fixed on nothing. The light playing off them produced an unnatural glint betraying their true nature, glass globes in place of eyeballs. To his right sat the frumpled figure of scholar number two, a dowdy character to be sure. His white hair was a wild and tangled mess. Two blackholes-for-eyes were split by a crooked nose. A piece of hay hung from one of the holes out of which a little mouse would periodically poke its nose to sniff the air and then quickly retreat. Even more unnerving was to see it scamper over the bridge of his nose from time to time, socket to socket. The third scholar was much more agreeable to me than the other two. A cravat encircled his head covering his eyes. He did not look quite so ancient as his fellows and his demeanor was much less severe.

I listened to their discourse without understanding. The argument seemed to be of an esoteric nature that I failed to grasp. My sympathy was with my cravated friend who apparently was at odds with the other two. The old man of the mouse-house head had been going on for a time and had reached some conclusion to which the elder nodded his head in agreement. The youngest, to whom it had been directed, gave a demur reply that sent number two into paroxysms of rage.

With a movement that belied his age the agitated man jumped up, secured his robes about his waist, and scrambled down the side of his book, head first. Like a mad squirrel he rifled through several pages, upside-down, finally stopping to share what he thought he had found there. At these frightfully peculiar acrobatics I let slip a giggle that so startled the inverted scholar that he almost lost hold of the book's edge. Finding a secure seat once more on top he and the others "looked" my way.

***

"Who's there?!" demanded the eldest, his glass eyes trained on a spot somewhere in front and to the right of me. "Well, out with it child. I heard your giggling just now!"

"Be gracious. He's just a boy", said the youngest. I hadn't noticed it before, but the cravat did not cover his right eye completely. Within its folds I could see a clouded orb peering out purposefully. "Where have you come from young one?"

"F-from the meadowlands beyond this forest glade," I stammered.

"What?!" cried Number Two. "What nonsense is he spouting about a forest and glade? What are such things but child's tales? Where is your book, boy? So small it could fit in your back pocket I wouldn't doubt." What he was saying was terribly confusing so I answered what I thought I had been asked. I began to describe the meadows and their flowing grasses like waves in the wind, of the trees like...

"Enough, enough," said the eldest with a peremptory wave of his hand. "I tire of your childish prattle." Hearing my brief description seemed to exhaust him somehow.

The youngest smiled at me and spoke meekly, "Yes, I've seen forms of what you describe, but such detail? Your imagination is commendable in this descriptive fiction. As you study and grow older you will see more of the truth." The other two harumphed at this and chided him for his eccentric equivocations.

At this point, frustrated and a little angry myself, I challenged them to come down from those terrific tomes and confirm, themselves, what I had described. "Come down, come down, he says," mocked the dowdy scholar. "Can he command the view we have from up here? I think not, the little ground-hugging mole." The eldest joined in the game of scolding me while the youngest simply looked down at his robe and picked at loose threads. Feeling saddened, especially for my slightly-sighted friend, I left them behind in the clearing as I had found them, arguing.

***

My mood lightened as I distanced myself from that circle of dead grass. Fresh air once more filled my lungs and cleared my head. The birds singing over head lifted my spirits and set me down a path different from the one I'd been on.

Death Island!

It has been quite some time since my son last updated his blog, Kramer's Kronicles, a blog we created to post his stories. We started it in January of this year as a way for him to use his time creatively over the winter months while stuck in the house. Over the summer it lay fallow and I wondered if he had lost the bug to tell a tall tale as each storyless month passed us by.

The past few days he has picked up the pencil again and has been working on a story entitled "Death Island." He drew a cover for it and he is now on "chapter five". At the end of chapter four he wrote a particularly scary scene which ended abruptly in cliff hanger fashion. He has picked up this technique from watching "Call of the Wild Man" on Animal Planet. It was a revelation to him when he realized that the show was set up so that something dangerous would be about to happen right as it cut to a commercial. This forces you to stick around and maybe even forego a snack or a potty break so that you don't miss anything.

Well today he disappeared upstairs and after some time I decided to check up on him. He usually does not stay that quiet for that long unless he is doing something he is not supposed to be doing. I snuck up the stairs very quietly and peeked around the corner only to find him sitting at his desk scribbling away. I snapped a shot with my phone and when he looked around to see what that sound was, I took the shot above. He read me what he'd added and as he read he found mistakes and marked them saying, "oh, that's wrong. I'll have to change that later." I told him the word for that is "editing."

I have a dream

I have a dream that one day my children may be free from the sins of their father, sins passed down from generation to generation, dyed white in denial, waiting to visit upon them that which they did not choose.

I have a dream that they may be free from imperatives hidden in the unconscious which generate stumbling blocks. That, instead, such things may be transformed by grace into stepping stones to wiser ways.

I have a dream that one day my desire to be seen and known is supplanted by the desire to see and know those who suffer similarly, without knowledge or support, to be given the strength to reach out, to lift up, to co-suffer and in so doing find healing together.

I have a dream.

***

Honour thy father and thy mother...

She sat across from us during the Divine Liturgy, on a bench typically reserved for the Bishop, when he visits.

It accommodates three seated, but this morning it was just her and a picture of her parents sitting there, together.

At some point the picture was transferred to her lap, facing outwards like an icon, held in a kind of hug.

At yet another time I saw her standing with it, showing it to others nearby, a big smile on her face.

Later I asked to be introduced to this lovely pair, she told me, "You don't really know someone until you know their parents."

***

The Gazebo

The Gazebo, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

A book and a beer accompany me to the back deck, sitting comfortably in an adirondack, under the attached gazebo. The two year old naps while the 8 year old mines for gold on his laptop in a world he is building one block at a time. The time away will likely amount to minutes, not hours, but it's nice to find at least a little time to be alone and even nicer when the weather cooperates.

The paperback on my lap has been sitting in the back seat of my car for a few months, waiting for an opportune time to tell its tale. I take in its faded cover and read the accolades on the back, but skip the one paragraph synopsis, afraid it might give away too much too soon. It begins with a foreword that I take for non-fiction, but then realize it is an attempt at realism in a fictitious account that wants you to believe it could have happened, like blair-witch-in-a-book.

The foreword finished, a breeze brushes my face and I look up. A rectangular light through the kitchen window catches my eye. I see my wife silhouetted by the bright interior of the refrigerator, such a strange perspective, like a voyeur, and an instant realization that I don't love her enough, that I don't appreciate her enough, that I let petty annoyances sour so many things between us. Do I deserve this house I am peering into, this wife taking stock of our food, this precious child sleeping, this son creating worlds rendered with the illusion of three dimensions?

The Context of Texting

We know
texting and driving
is bad
but what about
texting and walking?
Head down
mind far away
led astray
by electronic chatter
as people pass
paying them
no matter
robbing them
of existence
by cold indifference
withholding
the warm look
the kind smile
that could make
all the difference
in their day
maybe even
dare I say
their life?

everywhere present and filling all things...

Everywhere Present and Filling all Things, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

*****

Do not fear annihilation.
You cannot disappear
into nothingness
because there is
only somethingness.
Or better yet a
Someoneness who
is everywhere present
and filling all things.

*****

The Dangers of Denial

The Bridegroom, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

This is important. Are you hurting deep inside but afraid to show it? Seek out others who suffer. Do not look to those trying to convince you that they have it all together. You will only be invited into their delusion and yourself be deluded. The appearance of having less grievous life circumstances does not mean that they have something you need.

There is nothing wrong with acknowledging you suffer. It is a sign of healing, the pain of the surgeon's knife laid on your life. Take hope in that. Christ suffered and died to show the way. You must suffer and die to follow the road He traveled, even continually. It is a painful process by which the impurities of your soul are being burned away by God who in His love is a consuming fire. Another metaphor, I know, but how else to explain that which is well nigh inexplicable?

Lord save us from those who tickle our ears and tell us we have already attained what we have not already attained. It is a denial of salvation as process; a path, a journey, worked out in blood, sweat, and tears. It hobbles us spiritually even as it appears to strengthen us in the superficial assessment of others in like denial, those who would assert, "I am saved" and ask others, "are you saved?"

Denial works as a false sign that things are OK, that we are OK, when in fact we are ill and in need of healing. I recently saw a patient who had a mild stroke, pneumonia, and a vitamin deficiency, all of which have detrimental effects on the mind and body if not treated. She was refusing treatment or to acknowledge in any way that she was ill. She said, "I feel fine", and no amount of explanation, to include lab results and x-rays, could change her mind. Denial is a barrier to healing.

***

Death Comes for the Sergeant

I couldn't remember his name. Twenty years later and it wasn't coming to me. It bugged me all day at work and on the drive home it finally came to me, Carmichael, Sergeant First Class Carmichael. 

His first name is likely forever lost to me as only last names are regularly used in the Army. He was a non-commissioned officer in the mechanized infantry which might erroneously conjure up an image of a robot programmed for battle. Even so, his demeanor could resemble one at times. He was tall, gaunt, spoke little and showed little emotion. "Stoic" might be a good way to describe him. I met him in 1992 towards the end of my first tour in Korea as an infantryman. He came from the large infantry training center at Ft. Benning, Georgia where I'd finished my Basic Training the year prior to his arrival. He helped develop the training manual for the Bradley Fighting Vehicle which was a new troop transport vehicle that resembled a small boxy tank that carries soldiers into battle. Our battalion was to be the first to transition the Bradley into use in Korea.

I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I was chosen to be the gunner in his Bradley. He sat in the right half of the turret as the Bradley Commander (BC) and I sat in the left half of the turret, our shoulders practically touching. The third crew member was the driver who sat in his own separate compartment, the three of us communicating through helmeted headsets. The other infantrymen sat in a large compartment in the back separated from the turret by a curved sliding door. When the time would come to dismount, the back of the Bradley would drop to the ground forming a large ramp. My job was to stay in the turret and operate the weapons system which included a 40mm main gun resembling a miniature tank barrel, a coaxial machine gun, and two TOW (Tube launched-Optically tracked-Wire guided) missiles. The gunner and Bradley Commander work closely together to orchestrate all of these complex interactions and they spend a lot of time together, especially in the field training exercises that can last weeks at a time in austere conditions.

***

During the first of my two years in Korea, prior to the arrival of Sergeant Carmichael, my unit functioned for all intents and purposes as a light infantry unit, sans armored vehicles. When I arrived fresh from Basic Training, Delta Company was doing its three month rotation on the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), a kind of no-man's-land separating North and South Korea. We lived in tents at a place called Warrior Base and participated in night patrols within the DMZ as well as a lot of live fire exercises, guard tower duty, and something called QRF or Quick Reaction Force.

One of many surreal experiences included being on a guard tower in the middle of nowhere and hearing music playing throughout the night. The South side blasted mostly American pop music from huge speakers directed at the North. While on patrols in the DMZ proper you could sometimes hear the speakers from the North blasting their own kind of music and propaganda. One memorable night we were patrolling in our single file line somewhere along a shallow ravine and I heard the music coming from the North side for the first time. The song featured a female soprano and tuba with absolutely no other accompaniment. I felt like I was in a Stanley Kubrick film.

In the months leading up to the Bradleys arriving there was a lot of training that involved practicing fire commands, learning about vehicle maintenance, and studying its specs to include things like what kind of engine it had, what kind of fuels it could run on, the range of the various weapon systems, etc. For a few months, the gunners and BC's in our unit followed a 3rd shift schedule in order to get time on the Bradley simulator which resembled a small white trailer with no windows. Inside was a compartment which mimicked the turret of a Bradley and could take the gunner and Bradley Commander through a number of video game type scenarios in order to practice using the controls to engage enemy targets. All of the scenarios had to be successfully navigated as a team in order to move on to the next step of qualifying as a Bradley crew. It was a lonely routine, getting up in the wee hours of the morning to walk a quarter of a mile in the cold and dark to the simulator, half asleep and stumbling along dirt trails. During the morning we slept while the rest of Delta Company followed the regular training schedule.

When the Bradleys actually arrived, we continued this qualifying process of gunner-BC pairs. Sergeant Carmichael had already been through the simulation process at Ft. Benning and so we were paired to continue the qualifying process. All of our time training together culminated in a live fire exercise at a massive firing range near the Northern border of South Korea which was built at the base of a mountain. The qualifying runs occurred at night. The targets were large wooden cutout figures shaped like vehicles and set on tracks between us and the mountain. They were heated so that they would show up on our thermal scopes in the turret. Off in the distance they would pop up and move along tracks at which time the BC would identify them, ask for confirmation from the gunner, and then give the command to fire. I would open up on whichever weapon system was appropriate for that particular target at that particular distance. Some of them were a kilometer or two away. At the end of our two weeks we were a fully qualified Bradley crew.

There have been at least two memories from that two week stint at the firing range that have stuck with me most clearly over the years. The first one involved an unexpected interaction with the Korean guard sitting at the front gate. I was on my way to visit a makeshift tent set up outside the gates where you could trade an MRE (food sealed in plastic that you were issued each morning) for a hot bowl of noodles and a drink from an elderly Korean woman or "Aju-ma". As I passed the guard house the guard waved me over with a concerned look on his face and gestured at his small television set. On the screen was a helicopter's view of several city blocks burning in the night. He said something in his thickly accented English that I could not understand. After a few more attempts I figured out he was saying something about Los Angeles being on fire. I watched in horror and fascination having no idea what was happening. It wasn't until returning to our base a week or so later that I learned there had been rioting and fire setting in the wake of the Rodney King trial.

The second memory involved a Korean snack bar in a cinder block building located inside the firing range compound. Due to the nature of it being a live fire range, any time you left your tent you had to be in full gear, ie, kevlar helmet, flack jacket, web gear with full canteens, and your M16 rifle. Lumbering into the snack bar was made easier by bidirectional doors that swung inward and outward with just a push. The booths were made out of unfinished wood. You could buy hot noodle or rice dishes as well as some knockoff sodas, cash only. In the corner of the room was a large TV with a VCR and a few hundred bootlegged VHF movies stacked all around it. Whoever wanted to could choose a movie and pop it in. If you were there when a movie was ending a soldier or two would shamble forth and dig through the piles calling out movie titles to reach a consensus for the next movie to be seen. People would yell out things like, "Nah, we saw that one yesterday" or "That one sucks!" The day I visited the snack bar, the movie playing was "When Harry Met Sally." I watched Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan interact in a very un-Korean like manner while mortar rounds impacted on the nearby range every few minutes. Each time one exploded the doors would fly inward from the pressure and the glass in the window panes would rattle loudly. Encased and encumbered by my heavy gear, an orange soda in one hand and a pair of chopsticks in the other, I wondered how on earth I'd ever come to be in such a situation.

***

After qualification the winter came and the time for field training exercises arrived. In Korea, due to the large number of rice paddies, almost all field training occurs in the winter when there is less chance of vehicles getting bogged down and stuck in the mud. It was the received wisdom that any major conflict on the Korean Peninsula would occur in the winter months and many of the most famous battles in the Korean War were remembered as being fought in freezing temperatures. The Army motto in this regard is "we train as we fight" which, to my dismay, meant living out in the field for long periods of time cold, hungry, dirty, and stressed out.

Probably one of the most miserable nights of my life occurred during one of these field training exercises. We were all bedded down for the night in sleeping bags on frozen mud in the middle of some farmer's field with the wind howling and the temperatures well below freezing. We had to sleep with our clothes on and have our boots somewhere in the sleeping bag with us otherwise they would freeze. To make matters worse, we had our cold metal rifles between our legs which was exceedingly uncomfortable.

Sleep was almost impossible, but when it did finally come I was soon awakened for my turn at guard duty around 2am. My survival instincts kicked in and refused to let me out of that bag! After a few more jabs from the guard's rifle and some foul-mouthed threats I began to rub all my limbs vigorously to get them warmed up and prepared for opening the zipper of my sleeping bag. When I could stall no longer, I zipped it down to my waist, sat up, and quickly put on my coat. The boots came next and then the gloves. The time from unzipping to being fully clothed was only a minute or two but seemed like an eternity. The next hour was pure misery as I stumbled around in the dark stamping my feet and rubbing my gloved hands together to try and keep them warm while keeping an eye out for a nonexistent enemy.

***

After field training exercises we looked forward to getting hot showers, warm food, and sleeping in an actual bed. It was comical to ground your gear, peel your clothes off, and then look in the mirror before stepping into the shower. My head and neck would be dark brown from all of the accumulated grit and sun exposure while my torso would be bone white. The time not spent in the field was referred to as being "in garrison." It was not as exciting as living in the field, but a heck of a lot less stressful.

Many weekends were free to do with what you pleased which was not something you took for granted in Korea. I mostly spent them traveling to Seoul in violation of the Two Kilometer Rule which stated a soldier could not leave a two kilometer radius of the base without a special pass. This was easily circumvented by learning some Korean and familiarizing myself with the public transportation system to include the passenger train which connected to the northern most extension of the Seoul subway system one town south of ours.

One of these Saturdays I was hanging out in the small town outside of our base instead of traveling to Seoul. I returned to our barracks sometime around noon and there were people that I did not recognize standing around the front entrance to our barracks. They wore black clothes and had on sunglasses instead of the ubiquitous Army camouflage. A Sergeant I knew well saw me standing on the road unsure of what to do and came down to greet me.

"Hey Haney, are you OK?"

"Yeah, I guess so. What's going on Sergeant?"

He looked at me as if he didn't exactly know how to proceed.

"No one's told you what happened?"

I told him I'd been out all morning and had just returned.

As it turned out, after I'd left that morning Sergeant Carmichael's Korean wife had come to his room on the bottom floor of our barracks and knocked for awhile without an answer. When the CQ got the keys and opened his door they found him in his closet hanging by a cord. My roommate later told me she was crying and screaming, refusing to be consoled. I can only imagine what it must have been like for the majority of the soldiers in my unit who were sleeping off hangovers.

Things were eerily quiet as I stood there with the sun beating down on my back, unsure of what to do. I wandered back down to the front gate in a kind of daze. I left the base and I remember making my way to a small bridge on the other side of town. I don't know why I chose that particular spot but I hung out there for awhile just feeling the breeze blow down the river and trying to sort things out. Closer to evening I made my way to Shalom House. It was there that I sometimes attended Saturday night meetings of "The Fishermen", was a volunteer English teacher during the week, and hung out with my Korean friends playing ping pong and shooting pool.

After that I likely went out to a local coffee shop that my Korean friends and I had adopted as our after-hours spot. It was called "Gurim Madang" and the owner was the sister of one of my English language students. I must have been their token foreigner because I don't recall seeing anyone there other than Koreans in the nearly two years I frequented the place. It wasn't unusual for us to stay there until after midnight and then for me to make the long lonely trek back to my base and barracks in the wee hours on foot. This particular night I stayed out even later than usual.

When I eventually arrived at the three-storied barracks housing Delta Company there were no room lights on. It was probably two or three in the morning. I walked around back to the entrance that was nearest my room. When I came around the corner I saw some light spilling out into the darkness coming from a room on the bottom floor at the far end of the building, Sergeant Carmichael's room. I stood there for a moment and let the strangeness of the situation soak in before deciding to walk down the sidewalk and see what there was to see. I half expected to see him sitting on his bed spit shining his boots. Instead, the room was devoid of activity or occupation. A box of cornflakes sat on the bedside table beside a bowl. The door to his locker where he'd hung himself was open and revealed an empty interior. Someone had not thought to turn the light off after his body had been removed earlier in the day, and so I stood there in the grass awash in the room's shared light surrounded by darkness.

***

The next few days were spent in preparing for the funeral. A handful of soldiers from our platoon were chosen for the gun salute and rehearsed to a reasonable uniformity. Because of my sidekick status of being his gunner, I was chosen to be one of the people sitting on the platform in the front of the chapel along with the Commander and First Sergeant. I do not remember clearly what my role was for the service, but I seem to recollect reading the 23rd Psalm.

The Chaplain's message was exceptional. I thought to myself as he approached the podium, "How in the world does one give a Christian message for someone who has committed suicide?" I do not remember his sermon, only the impression that his words left, words that were gracious, humble, comforting, full of sadness as well as love. While he spoke, you could hear Sergeant Carmichael's wife sobbing and saying words to herself that were indecipherable, probably in Korean. When the Chaplain said "He was a good man..." she wailed, "MY man!"

In the week after the funeral I was required to go and speak with an Army psychiatrist at the base hospital to see how I was handling the situation . We chatted for awhile and I told him about how much I'd enjoyed my time in Korea. I talked about teaching English, my Korean friends, and some of my adventures, but nothing about my clandestine travels to Seoul and elsewhere. I was at the beginning of my second year tour in Korea, an extension that I'd requested, and they were offering to let me out of it and return to the States. I had no inclination to serve in the Army stateside and asked to remain in Korea to the end of my commitment. I must have checked out OK because they allowed me to stay in Korea and fifteen years later I became an Army psychiatrist myself.

The Bradley Fighting Vehicle

back ramp down revealing troop compartment

Sergeant Carmichael after our Bradley broke through

the ice and got stuck during a field training exercise

PFC Long, our Bradley driver, at Aju-ma's tent

my home during field training exercises

Hospitocalypse - a psychiatrist's tale

A Short Story, a photo by []Aaroneous Monk[] on Flickr.

Another call weekend had crept up on this Midwest psychiatrist much too close on the heels of the previous one. When I left the house in the morning, the wife and kids were still sleeping soundly. Despite my somber mood, it was a beautiful autumn morning with the sun just beginning to wash over the tops of the trees lining the road. A patch of fog near the river enveloped my car and transported me to the hospital before dissipating.

The hospital routine kicked off with the compiling and prioritizing of consults, calling the ER for updates, and checking Facebook for any comments that may have trickled in overnight. The doctor’s lounge was the first stop of the day. Nothing could be done until I had caffeine coursing through my veins. A metaphor popped into my head unbidden, "grease for my gray cells and the wind in my mainsails," which about summed it up. The fact it rhymed was just an added bonus.

The ID reader rejected my card three times before letting me in. With a click I entered the privileged area of physician gossip where the sacred Starbucks machine brewed its bean-mediated magic and kept the hospital running smoothly. Twenty minutes passed before I'd drained my cup and a hook shot deposited it into the corner trashcan. Looking around it seemed to me that the lounge was uncharacteristically empty, dead even. I wondered if Daylight Savings had yet again crept up on me and brought me in an hour early.

I continued my routine, riding up the yellow elevators to see patient number one. Reason for consult: altered mental status. "Should be fun," I thought sarcastically, my compassion at low ebb. She was in four-point restraints, pale, and with an intense stare that focused somewhere beyond me. I turned off the TV above my head as a violent scene flashed across the screen. When I turned around her face was less than a foot from my own as she leaned hard against the restraints, arms pulled tight behind her.

“BRAINS!” she yelled, appearing to fixate on my red bow tie.

I released the air caught up in my lungs with a slow exhalation through pursed lips and for a brief moment considered bouncing this one to the neurologist on call but could not come up with a plausible enough reason to do so. Behavioral changes secondary to a brain tumor? Not likely. I was stuck with this one. I backed up a step or two and attempted to reassert control of the interview by feigning curiosity and asked her what she meant by “brains”.

“Want brains,” she softly pleaded.

Moved by her apparent remorse, I said, “So, if I understand you correctly, you are not content with your current level of educational attainment?”

She lunged forward with an “AAARRRGGGHHH!” nearly pulling her restraints free.

"This one's turning into a Haldol special," I muttered and retreated quickly from the room to find her nurse for some stat orders.

Once again I found my immediate surroundings free of other people. Was everyone on a coffee break, for goodness' sake? I quickly made my way back toward the elevators. Approaching a side hallway, I first heard some footfalls and then saw some shadows moving at an odd pace. Turning the corner at a clip, I started to ask for the nurse from room 28. The words crashed into each other as they hit my larynx and fell back into my lungs unsaid.

Shuffling down the hallway were three nurses in scrubs, heads hanging, arms swinging, looking like they were overmedicated with Thorazine. They looked so very wrong. My instinct was to turn tail and run, but a kind of morbid curiosity had me rooted to the spot. The spell was broken when one of them clipped a crash cart and flopped to the floor like a drunken fish.

At that point the fight-or-flight response took over and spun me on my heels heading me back the way I’d come. Somewhere at the end of this particular hallway I knew there was a back stairwell that would take me down to the doctor’s lounge. I felt an urge to run but settled for a stiff speed walk, trying to maintain a professional demeanor, glancing at my watch as if I were late for a meeting.

Behind me one of the nurses panted, “Doctor... please... sign... orders... now.”

“Not now,” I said, my voice cracking. “I forgot my pen in my office.” It sounded like they were picking up the pace and I began cursing under my breath. In response the nurse stopped speaking and started shrieking. I reached the stairwell door and burst through. I took the stairs three at a time, crashing into the walls at each landing as I descended.

I realized I'd overshot my floor when I found myself staring at more shifty staff members coming up the stairs to meet me. “Doctor! Doctor!” they cried, mouths open like bizarre baby birds waiting for a worm.

“No time! No time!” I yelled back with a manic edge to my voice as I scrambled back up the stairs, flopped onto the landing, and lunged through the door in a scrambling speed crawl. On the other side of the door the hallway was empty and quiet. I pulled myself up and put my back to the door trying to catch my breath, heart pounding in my ears. I had the strange thought that this was what sinus tachycardia sounded like through a stethoscope. I could see the doctor’s lounge door about 50 feet away where the hall made a ninety degree turn. The impossibility of my situation had not yet hit me and my only thought was to find safety and solace in the lounge to regroup and figure out what was going on.

I started out at a slow jog but broke into a dead run as the door behind me burst open with the shoves and shouts of many voices. Ahead the lounge door seemed to be receding instead of getting closer like some kind of Alice-in-Wonderland trick. Worse yet, even more noises began to become audible from down the unseen turn in the hallway. Sooner than I expected I hit the hallway bend and slid with one foot out and one foot under  which brought me up standing when my lead foot hit the wall. "Safe!" I heard an umpire yell and thought I must be losing my ever-lovin' mind. Turning to the lounge door I detected motion down the unseen portion of the hallway in my peripheral vision. "Safe my ass", I thought.

With a sense of relief I reached up to pull my ID card off my lab coat only to realize in a moment of panic that it wasn't there. Looking back along the hall I'd just run down I spied it laying on the tiled floor halfway between me and the advancing group of moaning X-ray Techs. I looked back down the other hallway and confirmed that another group, this one a gaggle of gory candy stripers, was headed my way pushing a squeaky wheeled cart laden with cookies and a blood splattered coffee carafe . They weren't moving all that quickly but I wasn't exactly lithe and nimble with a clear head at the moment either. The thought of candy had me reaching into the inner pocket of my lab coat where I kept skittles for just such a low mood moment. A renewed sense of hope welled up as my fingers closed around an ID card that I thought had been lost weeks ago.

I swiped the card quickly only to have it emit a rejection beep. The sound that came forth from me was surprisingly similar to what had come from the throat of my patient upstairs. This was followed by a torrent of curse words and a flurry of swipes that were guaranteed to be ineffective.

"Get ahold of yourself, man" came a voice from the calmer part of my brain, the part that breeds denial as an overused coping skill. This was immediately rejected by the impulse to yell "Hey Mo!" and do a little jig while dragging my palms down my face in alternating fashion. And that's exactly what I did, finishing with two sharp barks to let the world know that Curly from the 3 Stooges was on the job and I'd officially lost my mind.

But survival instincts are not so easily undone. A slowing of time began to take hold of my perceptions. Arms reached out ominously from behind but at an inch a minute. The slicing motion of the card felt true as it found the card reader's groove. A clicking sound lasting seconds echoed in my brain as the weight of my body fell forward through the door, a strange sensation of falling that felt like flying or, at the very least, floating.

As I hit the floor time returned to its normal flow. I pushed the door shut with my foot from where I lay face down, hearing the clang of the carafe rebounding off of it and frustrated gurgling noises coming from the narrowing space. The electronic lock made a loud clicking noise, an audible prick deflating me like a balloon. I lay there for several seconds, eyes closed, getting my breath before rolling over onto my back. Reluctantly I forced myself to open my eyes and get them to focus. Floating above me, a pale head was looking down with wild hair and dark rimmed vacant eyes. I screamed like a little girl.

***

"Dude! What's your problem?" the zombie-like person yelled back at me. "Are you mental or something?"

My scream quickly died away and was replaced by panting as I clutched my chest. I forced myself to slow my breathing and focus on the person above me who upon closer inspection was obviously a teenager of the goth persuasion.

"No... no..." I said still trying to get control of my breathing. "I treat mental patients, but I am not myself mental as far as I can tell, though I am having some serious doubts at the present moment."

"Right, dude, whatever. What's up with everybody freaking out?"

I started to answer but then it hit me that he shouldn't be in the doctor's lounge. "How did you get in here?" I asked, propping myself up on my elbows and quickly scanning the room.

"I came in through the kitchen, dude."

His constant referring to me as "dude" was really starting to get on my nerves but I forced myself to ignore my growing irritation and think about what it was he was saying. I had always accessed the doctor's lounge through the electronically secured doorway, but of course the kitchen staff needed access to bring in the food and stock the drinks and snacks. "Show me how you got in", I said, and he took me to a back storage room where I found a swinging door with a small square window and a sign that read "Caution! Swings both ways." Great. This would definitely not do.

As if to emphasize the point the sound of a pan hitting the tiled kitchen floor echoed through the door and put me on high alert once again. My adrenal gland was getting a real work out and I immediately went into action dragging large boxes over to the door.

"Help me, dude!" I yelled. Yes, I'd actually called him "dude" not knowing his name. He snapped out of the time-out his overstressed brain had put him into and helped me drag and pile some heavy boxes over against the door. Through the small glass window I saw five or so shambling kitchen workers headed our way and what appeared to be the neurologist bringing up the rear. "Yeah, he's not gonna be much help to me today," I thought.

We braced ourselves against the boxes as the grizzly group reached the door and as they shoved in, we shoved out. The boxes began to slide towards us despite our best efforts. I was on the skinny side and the goth kid looked like he hadn't eaten in weeks. Lucky for us the door was in the corner of the room and after a four to five inch gap had widened in the door the boxes came to an abrupt halt and moved no further. One side of the boxes was flat against the wall and the front corner of the bottom box was wedged against a solid door stop. Whatever was wrong with these poor saps they didn't appear to be too bright and only seemed to have one direction, forward, which nicely solved the problem of our bi-directional door.

When we realized the door was not going to move any further we collapsed with our backs still against the boxes and simply sat there on the floor for an indeterminate amount of time. Feeling like it was the right thing to do I eventually reached across my body with my right hand and offered it to the kid, "Dr. Romero at your service, but you can call me George. Thanks for your help."

The kid slowly looked down at my offered hand still somewhat in shock and stammered, "Sh-shaun" as he took hold of it. I noticed the back of his four fingers had three crudely tattooed letters and a question mark which looked like "W-T-F-?" . It seemed strangely apropos to our situation and I felt myself warm to him a bit. With moans in the background and the occasional bump of the boxes against our backs I struck up a conversation.

"OK, Shaun. What brought you to the hospital today?" I asked. It seemed important to normalize the situation if that was even possible.

He rubbed the back of his neck, then started rubbing his eyes vigorously. "Dude... uh, George," he corrected himself, "I came to see my Mom. She got into a knock-down drag-out with her boyfriend and then ate a shitload of her Perc-30s. She was in the ICU with a tube down her throat for a day or two, and now she's strapped to her bed, probably psycho from coming down off that shit and all the Jack she drinks." I wanted to ask him if she was in room 28 by chance, but refrained from doing so.

"Are you the one who found her?" I asked.

"Dude," he said again. I just sighed and let it go. "It was totally fucked up. She was out of her mind and threatening herself with a big kitchen knife when I showed up, waving it around and screaming. She started trying to cut her hair with it, but lost her balance and fell and hit her head on the corner of the table. I was scared and didn't know what the fuck to do. She was knocked out and her head was bleeding. Her donkey-balls boyfriend took off and left me to deal with her."

He took in a quick deep breath at this point and looked like he might be close to tears. To keep him from shutting down, I offered, "Dude, that sucks."

"Yeah, sucks donkey balls that sorry-ass son of a bitch. My Dad was a crackhead and left us when I was five. Mom's all I have 'cept for my druggin' buddies, but they bug out when the money runs out so my Mom's pretty much it. I couldn't leave her like that, so I called 911 and held a towel to her head till the ambulance got there."

"I'm sorry you had to go through something like that, Shaun." It boggled my mind to think our current ghastly situation was something not unlike what he probably experienced on a fairly regular basis. He was used to hobnobbing with the walking dead (if that's what was going on here in the hospital, I hadn't quite figured that out yet), damaged people with empty lives looking to drugs and drama, with a sprinkling of sporadic violence, to convince themselves they still existed. The one person he felt most connected to in this world was likely two floors above us strapped to a bed in her own private hell.

We sat there for a while, not saying anything. When I looked over at him, his face was streaked with mascara. Images of Alice Cooper bubbled up from some odd corner of my mind. Almost involuntarily (maybe it was the stress?) I belted out, "School's out FOR-EHHH-VA!"

Shaun jumped a bit and leaned away from me, wiping his eyes with his shirt. "Dude, you're messed up," he said, trying to stifle a grin. "And you're no Alice Cooper with that lame-ass bow tie."

At this, the unbearable tension of our predicament seemed to crumble away with some fitful snorts and then out and out laughter. It started to wane until some howling noises coming through the crack in the door set us off again. We both ended up in the fetal position on the floor clutching our guts and gasping for air. I wiped a tear from the corner of my eye and once again wondered if I was cracking up.

***

After a couple of false starts, we eventually regained our composure and sat back up against the boxes, shoulder to shoulder in silence once again. The laughing episode had broken down some invisible barrier between us and I felt myself to be more calm and thinking more clearly. I even imagined having a son like Shaun some day, ideally without makeup, tattoos, and body piercings, but even that wouldn't be a deal-breaker. My introspection came to an end as I began wondering what was going on inside Shaun's head and how we might work together to get out of our predicament. When he spoke again, it was clear he'd been thinking of candy.

"Dude, I think I saw some malted milk balls in that other room. Do you think we could snag some?" Since the barricade didn't seem to be going anywhere, we got up and headed back there.

While he raided the candy bins, I switched on the TV to see if it could make any sense out of what was going on. Sure enough, there was a reporter standing in front of a ribbon of yellow police tape with the hospital behind him in the distance and emergency vehicle lights flashing in alarm. It quickly became clear that they knew even less about what was happening than I did. Somewhere amid the newspeak I heard "possible virus" and "sealed." It was the "sealed" part that actually gave me pause. The lounge was morphing into a tomb around us.

Shaun came up behind me as I switched off the TV. I turned to find him with chocolate at the edges of his mouth and a wearing a goofy grin. "Wha'd he say?"

I wasn't sure if I should tell him about the hospital being sealed or not. It was hard to get a read on this kid as to whether or not he was stable or on the verge of flipping out. A lot had happened in a short amount of time and denial could be a good thing if it helped keep a lid on the hysteria. "He said there might be a virus going around that's got people acting weird."

He accepted my answer without comment. He was definitely in denial. I wasn't too concerned that the lounge could be breached but I didn't know how long we could survive on candy and soda if this "virus" spread outside the hospital and we were stuck here for an extended period of time. I checked the lounge entrance and put my ear to the door. There was an odd thumping noise along with muffled moaning and muttering sounds. I returned to the back entrance and found the boxes still firmly wedged in place, and zombies, for lack of a better word, loitering in the kitchen. When they saw me they quickly re-congregated at the door and commenced pushing. The closest one got his arm through the door but could get no further.

Eventually fear turned into boredom.

Shaun came up with a way to pass the time by using a plastic spoon to try and flip raisins into the mouth of whichever zombie was trying to get his head through the gap in the door. We sat indian style about five feet away, each with a cup full of raisins. Our relative proximity and being hit by raisins would rile the thing up and cause it to open its mouth menacingly. My strategy involved alternating shots, one in the eye to get it irritated and opening its mouth wider with a quick follow-up shot into the gaping hole. In retrospect it was probably an unwise course of action in regards to wasting food but neither of us liked raisins much and it allowed us to vent our frustrations at the situation we found ourselves in.

***

At least an hour had passed since I'd begun my call day and my adrenalin was beginning to peter out leaving me feeling empty and exhausted. If ever I'd needed a second morning cup of coffee in my life it was now. Shaun appeared to be napping on a sofa with eyes closed and mouth hanging open, presumably content that he'd won the raisin flipping contest. Upon closer inspection he had small microphone buds in his ears and had escaped into his electronic soundscape where others could not follow. I got a shiver down my spine realizing for all intents and purposes there was little to distinguish him from the unfortunate things on the other side of the door simply by looking at him. I moved over to the cabinets and opened the one closest to the Starbucks machine.

Just seeing the cups with their green star-crowned mermaid brought on a surge of energy like a junkie's euphoria in handling the crack pipe, even before it is inhaled. I grabbed one and slipped a cardboard sleeve over it before placing it under the dispenser. I'd gotten used to selecting the half-caf half-decaf blend option in an attempt to decrease my caffeine intake but today there would be no half measures. The situation called for maximum brain power and heightened senses to tackle the potential challenges ahead. After only a sip or two I felt my mood picking up even more and I made my way back to the storage room to rummage around and see what I could find to fight zombies.

Rummaging around I discovered a metal plate behind a cart that turned out to be the door to an archaic dumbwaiter that hadn't likely been used in decades. At least now there was a potential alternate exit from the doctor's lounge though it was obvious I wouldn't be able to fit in it. Maybe Shaun could if he had to, excepting any claustrophobic tendencies. I glanced over to the blocked door and was taken aback to find that the current zombie grasping at air in the gap was the neurologist, Dr. King. The revulsion I felt did not linger long, turning instead into pity, and then finally into curiosity. I approached him carefully and stood just out of his reach.

His eyes were gray and clouded over like someone with severe cataracts. He moaned and swiped at my white coat which I could have almost imagined was an attempt to pat me on the arm in different circumstances. At that particular moment I knew his intention was not so innocent and cordial, though we had had our diagnostic disagreements in the past.

"Stephen, you've seen better days," I said.

He withdrew his arm from the gap so that only his face was sticking through, mouth agape. On a whim I reached over and poured some of my coffee into it, thinking it couldn't hurt and might even help. God knows caffeine had resurrected me on many an occasion.

He sputtered in anger and shoved his face further through the gap. The hot liquid in his mouth pooled for a moment and then was gone down the dark hole at the back of his throat. It seemed less like a swallow than a function of gravity. With this something very strange began to happen. He stopped moaning and stood perfectly still. I stepped closer, forgetting I was then in arm's reach. Something appeared to be happening to his eyes. I leaned in even further, fascinated at what I was seeing. The uniform dead gray color was beginning to warm and rotate like the froth on a well made cappuccino. Brown and white swirls coalesced into a round brown iris surrounded by white sclera. He then jerked upright, away from the door, and inhaled deeply as if preparing for a deep water free dive.

Exhaling violently, he found his voice, "What the Sam Hill is going on here?!" he bellowed. He'd been through some inexplicably gruesome experience beyond all human imagining but still retained his ability to forgo swearing. His holier-than-thou reputation had remained intact in a room full of loitering zombies. Unbelievable. The old irritation at him started to creep back in before I forcibly pushed it back down. His yelling had caught the attention of his former undead comrades and they looked none too happy about him switching sides.

"Stephen!" I yelled. "Get your ass over here quick!" My head was now the one in the gap and my arm wildly beckoned him my way. He looked at the approaching zombies and then at me with a bewildered expression and wisely chose to move in my direction. By kicking the door outward the gap widened another inch or two and he lodged himself into the opening. He was unable to get more than half way through due to his substantial paunch. I grabbed his arm and put my foot on the wall for leverage. I gave a terrific tug but to no avail. The zombies were progressing our way slowly but surely as if bound by an unspoken rule of the walking dead, "Thou must walk but never run."

Stephen whipped his head back my direction, "What's going on, George?" he said, panicked.

"Shut up and suck it in!" I grunted, still pulling as hard as I could.

Stephen looked back around to find himself almost face to face with one of those things he'd just been. "Shit!"

Hearing him actually swear put a grin on my face and a surge of energy suffused my tired limbs. With an almost audible popping sound the rest of him came through the door. He landed squarely on top of me sending the air out of my lungs. The door once again found its place against the boxes narrowing the gap while a zombie beat the air where the neurologist had been.

Stephen rolled clumsily off of me, staggered to his feet, and began brushing off his white lab coat. "George, is this a nightmare? That's gotta be it. I'm having a nightmare," he tried to convince himself. "I would never use such foul language in real life. I'll wake up in my own bed soon and we'll laugh about it at work today, but I'll leave out the cussing part." I was still trying to get my breath back and making odd noises as a consequence. "Are you a zombie now, George? Should I kill you or something?" He began to look around him for a weapon and snatched up a mop handle with a dangerous looking metal head on it that had been leaning against the wall. It was obvious he was still somewhat shy of being back to his normal self.

My strained attempts at speaking and waving my arm in front of me to ward him off wasn't exactly clarifying the situation. He swept the mop handle up above his head with both hands and spread his feet apart to firmly anchor his death blow. As the mop dropped I rolled out of the way but not far enough as my shoulder hit the boxes and stopped me short. The mop head grazed my back and my lungs found the air they needed to let out a scream of pain. He lifted the mop handle once more above his head. I only had time to look back at him knowing this was not going to end well. Oh me of little faith. At that moment the form of Shaun, like a gaunt arrow, flew over me and toppled the stout neurologist backwards onto his back. Shaun straddled him and his hands found Stephen's neck and clinched down like a set of boney vice grips. Now Stephen was once again the one making all of the gurgling noises.

"Shaun, stop!" I yelled with lungs now mercifully full of air.

"Dude, he was trying to clobber you!"

"I know, I know, it was a mistake. He thought I was a zombie. Let him go!"

Shaun looked at me, then at Stephen, then back at me. "Fine!" he said in disgust and released his grip. He got off the beleaguered neurologist and gave a tug at the back of his black jeans which had ridden down and then swiped his hand across his upper lip clearing some snot before wiping it on his shirt.

***

I instructed everyone to sit in a circle. We needed to get Stephen up to speed. We explained to the best of our understanding what we thought was going on. My version included some technical neurological jargon that I knew he would appreciate. Shaun's version was more informed by pop culture references with several curse words mixed in which caused the neurologist no small amount of discomfort . Regardless of the perspective, the bottom line was we were in a shitload of trouble unless we could come up with some kind of plan. My little experiment with the coffee had been one of those great serendipitous moments that has been responsible for so many major scientific discoveries of the modern age. The CEO and founder of Starbucks could also probably take some credit but he was filthy rich and could afford to be left out of the equation.

Stephen pointed out we needed a delivery system if the coffee idea was going to fly. Shaun agreed and probably had the most experience with large volume water guns which had become all the rage well after we old fogies had reached adulthood, tragically so. My brilliant idea came in the form of a thought bubble which transformed into an ambu bag in my mind's eye. An ambu bag is a large flexible plastic bubble with a face mask on one end and a place to connect a tube on the other to help people breathe in emergencies. This is accomplished by the presence of a one-way valve and squeezing the bubble to force air flow. More brainstorming finished out the idea with more tubing, some surgical tape, a cylindrical metal trash can, and a square bottomed trolley used to move cafeteria trays. The only problem with our improbable Suessian contraption was we had no ambu bag, tubing, or surgical tape.

The curse words rose swiftly to my tongue but then transformed when I saw how peaked and downtrodden the neurologist looked. What came out instead was, "Dadgummit! What the flip are we going to do now?" The more I thought about it the dumber our idea seemed. "Dumb, dumb, dumb", I repeated quietly to myself which ended up triggering the memory of discovering the dumbwaiter. Of course! Some hope flooded back in to fill the empty cistern of this B-movie madness.

"Stephen, Shaun, there's a dumbwaiter behind that cart", I pointed over to where I'd discovered it earlier. "It may very well go up to some of the supply rooms where we can find the missing pieces for our coffee delivery system. They both perked up at this sudden revelation and we all crawled over on hands and knees to have a look. There was a rectangular metal door measuring about two foot high and a foot and a half wide with a small glass window. We moved the cart and some boxes out of the way to access it more easily. With a few kicks and using the mop head as a wedge we managed to get it open. The space inside went back about 2 feet. We found some old dusty rags in it and used them to wipe out the mouse droppings. It was evident from the size that neither I nor Stephen would be able to fit into it. An unspoken word passed between us and we turned our attention to Shaun at the same time.

Shaun looked at me, then at Stephen. We both stared back at him waiting for it to sink in. The sinking was a little slow in coming, but sink it did. "No fuckin' way, dude! I ain't getting in no midget elevator!" He scrambled back towards the door but then an inhuman wail came from the kitchen and he just as quickly scrambled back to us. It was heartbreaking to watch, his head in his hands, rocking back and forth, scared. "My dad used to lock me in the closet sometimes when he was high or drunk. If I yelled or screamed, he'd open the door and kick me to shut me up. I'm sorry, but I can't get in that thing."

I pulled him over and let the top of his head lean into my chest while I put my hands on his shoulders and then on his back allowing him to rock. "I'm sure you were a very brave kid Shaun, even at five years old." He didn't say anything but his rocking motion slowed and eventually stopped. Standing up straight he took a deep breath and ran his hands through his shock of hair.

"I'll do it for mom," he finally said in a tense voice. He looked even paler than his normal pale self. With his permission I walked him through a hypnotic technique to help calm himself and focus. In this state, with repetition and reassurances, we backed him into the dumbwaiter and explained in detail what it was we were looking for. I made sure the ratchet mechanism was fully engaged and Stephen got ahold of the ropes of the pulley system. Together we heave ho'ed and up Shaun went.

Two floors up he spied shelves full of medical supplies through the little window and yelled down for us to stop. The dumbwaiter door on that floor actually opened without much effort and we heard him flop into the room. Lucky for us the supply room door had an external keypad lock to discourage unauthorized access and was therefore zombie-proof. After several minutes of foraging and yelling back down the chute he had secured the needed items and gotten them into the dumbwaiter. I had the wherewithal to mark the rope with my ink pen to know where the dumbwaiter was sitting before lowering it down with the items in order to return it quickly to Shaun if something emergent came up.

Of all the impractical points of our plan it seemed to me that getting Shaun into that dumbwaiter was the most impractical of all. I could have never done it and I had had a relatively secure childhood with no major bumps, though there was that time my Mom made me crawl under the bathroom stall door at the mall to let her in because she did not have a dime to put in the pay-to-poop door lock, but I digress. We got Shaun back down without incident, though he promptly vomited as soon as he was securely back in the room. I'd judged him unfairly with his "dude" and outlandish appearance but now I was in awe of this teenage boy.

***

We gave him some time to recover and then began building our contraption in earnest. My job was to set up the trashcan trolley while Stephen and Shaun worked on the coffee pumping mechanism. I wheeled the trolley into the doctor's lounge and cleared an area to work in. I felt like a vandal as I dumped the trash onto the floor and set the trashcan on the trolley with the heavy duty trash bag still in it. Next I taped the trashcan securely to the trolley handles and then wheeled it in front of the Starbucks machine. After breaking into a few locked cabinets I found the the sealed bags of coffee beans, chose the blonde roast, and filled the bins on top of the machine. I then placed my hands on either side of the machine and worked it forward until the dispensing head had cleared the counter top. I jumped up on the counter and used my heel to break off the catch tray so the coffee could flow directly into the trashcan below.

Shaun peeked in the room to see if I was all right. "I'm fine, I'm fine," I waved him off. "Just had to modify the machine a bit." Truth be told I was having some fun with this, tapping into some of my own repressed adolescent rage.

By the time I'd brewed enough grandes to fill three quarters of the trashcan my apocalyptic compadres had a working prototype of the pump ready to test. A long stretch of bendable plastic tubing was dropped down into the coffee filled trashcan. Shaun held the ambu bag it was connected to. Where the face mask had been the same kind of tubing had been attached instead and secured with tape. This tubing was about three feet long and ended inside of a large syringe also secured by tape. Shaun pumped the ambu bag and the brown liquid could be seen snaking up the tube until reaching the narrowed syringe head and arching across the room in a strong thin stream. Wunderbar!

We wheeled it to the back door and yelled at the five kitchen-worker-cum-zombies, and they immediately obliged us by heading for the door. Shaun expertly hit them one by one in the mouth, bringing their advance to a standstill. Much like the neurologist, they experienced a disorienting transformation that required a little time to play itself out before we could reorient them and explain what had happened to them. Moving the boxes and stepping out into the kitchen was an exhilarating feeling. Free at last!

The plan now was to emancipate the hospital as quickly and safely as possible. It was the "safe" part that had us concerned. We'd hit the kitchen workers from the security of our inaccessible position, but what would happen in the broad hallways of a medical ward? It was Stephen who came through for us. He considered himself an amateur military historian, and this was his time to shine. He was full of knowledge gleaned from National Geographic, Jane's Defense Weekly, and Clausewitz's On War. It was Philip of Macedon's phalanx formation that inspired our strategy. Stephen explained the idea as we gathered and distributed mop handles. He and one of our new number took up positions in front, two each on either side and two in the back, with Shaun and me in the middle manning the coffee shooter. Stephen also took charge of the route we would take, starting on the top floor and working our way down.

We met no resistance getting to the elevator. As we ascended in that cramped space I got a glimpse of what soldiers must feel like on the eve of battle, the only difference being I was manning a mobile trashcan full of coffee while listening to Manfred Mann singing "Blinded by the Light" over the elevator speakers. Yes Manfred, I was revved up like a deuce and ready to get this over with. A dinging noise indicated we'd reached our floor and I took a deep breath as the doors separated.

Loitering in the foyer in front of us were several zombies looking like their AA meeting had been interrupted by a bunch of drunken college students. The two mop handles in front were thrust forward as we moved out of the elevator. Shaun began shooting even before we'd all gotten out. It is a memory that is forever burned into my hippocampus. We bristled like an enraged porcupine rolling into that group, mop handles thrusting in all directions, Shaun spinning and firing like he was in the most kickass video game that ever was.

***

The mopping up took about two hours and somehow we ended our hospital-wide assault in front of room 28. Shaun and I paused, silent for a moment. I finally broke the silence, "Is this your mom's room?"

"Yeah, this is it."

"OK, let's go then."

He led the way. She was still in restraints but sleeping, eyes moving fitfully under closed eyelids. Shaun found a cup and, with a shaking hand, scooped up some coffee from the bottom of the trashcan. "Mom, it's me Shaun," he whispered. She moaned a little but did not open her eyes. "Mom, wake up," he said, a little louder. "It's me, Shaun." She opened her eyes and looked wildly around the room. Before she could react further, he poured the coffee into her mouth.

Nothing happened.

There was no transformation. Shaun stared as his mother writhed and let out a stream of obscenities. Tears flowed down his cheeks. I pulled him into a hug. He resisted at first but then went limp.

"It's OK, Shaun," I assured him. "She's just in withdrawal, and we can treat that. She's gonna be OK." I felt some strength come back into his arms as he returned my hug and we stood quietly holding each other.

It had been one hell of a day.


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