One


Consciousness wavered before him as if he were being carried by violent crashing waves in an angry sea. Each moment flashed before his eyes, imprinting in his brain like out of focus snapshots taken by an old camera. Each shallow breath he took steadied the room somewhat. Eventually, he could just about make out the rushing white shapes of beings around him. A constant stream of florescent light beamed down on him, making his eyes weep with salty tears. A symphony of beeping and humming of machines sang through his ears.  
     Then a thought came: Move your body.
     He couldn’t. He felt like a piece of lifeless meat, ready to be taken to a butcher.  The beeping in the background grew noticeably louder. A face loomed over him, thankfully blocking the blinding ray. It was an oval face, a beautiful face. From the artificial radiance of the room, it was not dissimilar to a full moon reflecting the sun. Pools of deep shadows cast where the curves and crevices upon its visage were, like deep craters upon a lunar surface. It had white blonde hair that was tied back, but for one lone curl that insisted on rebelling and hanging loose.
     An Angel?  He thought remotely.
     “He’s regaining consciousness doctor. You may speak to him now, before the anaesthetic runs out.” The face said.
     The blur of white figures around him stopped.
     “I wish to be alone with him.” Came the reply as a stern order.
     “Doctor, something could go wrong. He’s not in a stable condition.” Another voice floated into the conversation.
     A moment of silence hung in the air. The radiant face that looked celestial to him shifted out of view. He tried to murmur in protest, but all that came out was a string of warm salvia. His tongue felt heavy like an anchor, rooted in dryness of the bottom of his mouth.
     “I will not repeat myself.” That same voice of authority stated. It sounded faintly familiar to him. He knew they would have to obey that tone or suffer the consequences. They apparently had learnt that too, as the sound of a dozen or so feet filed out of the room without further protest, followed by a metallic click as they closed the door behind them.
      He perceived the loneliness of the room now, an awkwardness as the person who had sent out that order deliberated on what to do next. All of his senses sharpened with each space between his tight breathing; he even felt, with a jolt of excitement, a cold draught pass along his entire body.
     Am I naked?  
    The many fine hairs along his body reacted, standing erect to protect him from the cold, covering him in spot-like goose bumps.
    A bearded, unkempt face loomed over him, like the face of a biblical prophet. There was harshness, intensity in the face’s eyes, a hardness that was beyond worry and stress. He noted the dark circles under them, the frown lines, and the small wrinkles that appear when stress takes over life. It seemed to be frowning, the strong nose grimacing, the lips turned down and never smiling. It was all familiar, so familiar.
    “Adam.” It said – no, he realised this was a man– “Adam, can you hear me?”
    In reply he blinked, understanding; yet not being able to express. The man placed a hand on his bare shoulder, as if to comfort him in some way.
    “Adam, son, you don’t have to go through this”
    Son.
    That word brought back memories of a distant remote island. Turquoise waters like silk, lapping gently against fine white sands. He was running over green hills, tumbling down and down. Climbing trees so high, his mother - his beautiful mother consoling him after falling off a branch. Warm embers roasting fish near the moonlit sea, tales by the fire, tales that this man told – his father.
      “Father…” Adam forced the thought out of his mouth, his tongue rubbed like sandpaper along the roof of his mouth as he formed the sound. As soon as he had done it, he wished he hadn’t. Consciousness flowed through him, as if someone had turned on a light bulb within is head, causing him to see things that were safely muted within the dark previously.
     One by one, the cells in his body came alive. He recognised that he was strapped down – constricted to a metal operating table. Right down to the tips of his toes travelling upwards to the crown of his head, hundreds of multicoloured wires were extruding from his bare body. They were attached to the complicated looking machines covering the walls of the room, the devices that hummed, purred, beeped in the background. Adam noticed that their song became louder and louder with each moment that he became aware.
       Something within Adam was arising. His brain told his heart to go faster, and faster. Panic, panic, it told him. Sirens whirled through his ears.        
       “Adam, are you okay? Shit. He’s turning.” His father ran across the room to a mirror like window and banged his fists into it, to little avail. “Get in here! Lucille, he’s turning!”
        Turning?  He had little time to figure out what that meant. The pain came. So sharp, so sudden, that it caused his vision to blur to a blinding light, more blinding than the lamp above him. He clenched his fists and gritted his teeth with a jerky severity causing them to come loose and chipped. His face screwed up and turned beetroot red. He felt his brain within his skull wanting to get out, wanting to explode through the thick calcified bone. He felt acute, needle like stabbings along the length of his body, it was as if ten men were repeatedly thrusting a cold, iron swords into him.
     Obscured shapes hurried around him, shouting, panicking. Adam breathed out a short wisp of air, a moment of relief. His eyes lolled back into his head lazily. Consciousness was waning again.
   We’re losing him!
   Get the needle. I’m going to give him the injection.
   No, Robert, we can’t! It’s too risky-
   Do I have a choice? Just do what I say woman!
   Another moment of intense awareness filled him with excruciating ripping, tearing along his body. He now felt as if his organs were rejecting each other, raging a war against him. And he was losing. He let out a howling scream of agony. Blunt nails ripped through the rough palms of his hands, his toes curled over and tore helplessly at the slippery metal of the table. All of his muscles tensed, heaved.
     It seemed as if an earthquake was shaking the whole of the room, the whole of the world, and he was the centre of it, he was the fault line. His whole body was quivering. It felt like inside him two tectonic plates were rubbing violently against each other causing mass destruction. But the destruction was within him.
    Around him, people were desperately trying to stable his body, to stop his violent seizure. Warm strings of blood trickled out of his nose and ran down to his neck and onto the table. His father was behind him, he sensed him there. He could feel him moving, preparing something of importance behind him. Although Adam couldn’t control himself, although he had little thought for what was happening around him, Adam still held the wish, a final earthly thought of wanting to see what his father was doing.
     The last pain he felt was a great penetrating crash upon the crown of his head. It was beyond all pain he had ever felt before, it was as if a ten foot giant was ramming a great, pointed steel pole into his head and knocking it down with the force of a sledgehammer the size of an house. It lasted for but a second. But in that second, his body released all bodily fluids through every opening. He lurched forward and the white-coated people vainly holding him down flew into the machinery around him. The hundreds of wires popped simultaneously out of his body, giving them the appearance of wild, twisting snakes that were sliding out of him and attacking the room and its inhabitants. Adam was sure he had heard the snap of metal, the sound of the breaking of the metal shackles that had left him constricted.
     Then it all stopped. No shaking. No pressure. No blood. Now he was floating. He suddenly knew the blissful feelings of a feather as it rises, the gentle upward drifting of a foreign, yet welcome breeze. He felt the fibres of each delicate strand on a birds wings – or angels wings. He wasn’t sure – it didn’t matter. Pure lightness filled him, this lightness had a substance, and it was like glue, none-physical glue that held all living things together. In this moment, he felt more alive than he had ever been in his mundane life. He began to remember things from the thing he had claimed reality. The first glance he gave his mothers as a newborn, the awe in her glinting eyes, and his tiny hands wrapped around his father’s fingers. He remembered the sun beating down on his head and shoulders, and realising that in that sensation, he had found the simple knowing of his existence.  His first fascination of watching seagulls fly through the air and wondering how they kept up in the endless skies without falling. He had ridden on the back of a dolphin with hands up in the air, with not a care for anything. His first loves kiss, and the breaking of his heart when it had ended. The tears he had shed for strangers, the smiles he warmed for the face of friends.
     He felt the pureness of living, of pure loving. It was so subtle, yet so powerful. Like the fragrance of wildflowers carried by the faintest of winds, flying with cloud like dandelion seeds that dance in circles along the breeze in a stolen ride.
    For how long has it been this way?  He questioned himself severely. It seems like forever, it seems like this feeling has never left me. He bathed in the blissful sensation, still steadily rising as a feather. Then he asked: Why didn’t I notice this before?
    It went black. He was slipping. Being rejected. He clung to one last strand on his pure white feather that was still floating upwards. With all his might he hung, dangling. He didn’t want to fall.
     Why me? Don’t take this away from me; I don’t want to go back there!  He cried to someone, he knew not who he prayed to, but he would’ve done anything to stay where he now knew he belonged. Yet, there was still a particle within him that told him he must let go. He knew he had to go back.
    His fingers slipped from the softness of the thin, yet long strand. It broke and disintegrated into myriad fragments like shattering glass. He fell, twisting, turning, and spinning down back into the abyss until all light disappeared.
   Adams inky black eyes were suspended in time, wide, full of reverence, full of apprehension. He had realised where he would be returning.   
    And it wasn’t the coldness of the operating table.