Out in the parking lot, I looked around for a glimpse of Hugo, but he wasn't anywhere to be seen.
It had become one of those scorching days in the city, after the cold night. The temperature was well over 100 by now, and the sun dazzled my eyes with a glare that if it were audible would have affected me like fingernails on a chalkboard. The rising heat formed ripples in the air making everything shimmer and look crippled.
Of course the surface of my car was sizzling. It was like a smelting furnace on wheels, but one that I knew I had to enter eventually. I left the two front doors open, started both the engine and the air conditioner, and felt my uncovered skin stinging as it cooked in the heat.
"Shit!" I said. "It'll be a while before I can expect to shut myself inside of that thing!"
With both doors still open and standing half in and half out of the car, I reached over the steering wheel to check that the air conditioner was on full-force. As I did, I felt an unfamiliar numbness in my body. My vision split into two images. I couldn't force them to merge. My God, I was seeing two of everything.
My balance began to fail me, and I wasn't able to force myself to remain upright. I didn't feel any pain; all the while my access to the world around me disintegrated. I was helpless and completely without understanding of what was happening to me.
Can you recall what it's like to switch a video clip into slow motion? The soundtrack turns into groaning, unintelligible blather, and shapes float in place without direction. Everything moves as though gravity had instantly increased ten-fold. But then, add to that--in my case--the picture was growing dim in duplicate. My body seemed to be twisting slowly, turning counter-clockwise. I knew I was going to fall, yet I had no means to catch myself or to do anything about it. I felt very, very weak and very, very tired. And then I was very, very gone...
The world I'd entered so abruptly was too powerful to resist. I realized that my most assiduous efforts to will myself out of it were useless; so I just thought, "Give it up, Kev,... you don't have any other choice!" And I gave up my will to the most peaceful, untroubled state I'd ever experienced. There was nothing, no sound, no heat, no car, no me.
Later.... much later, I think... I'm not sure just how much later, once again I was vaguely aware of being infinitely tired; my limbs felt so heavy.
"I must still be alive," I thought. But I felt so, so tired. All I wanted to do was sleep, to return to the peace I'd found when I was abducted and carried to this alternate place.
But someone called my name. That was annoying. It wasn't a voice I recognized; so I just lay there with my eyes closed, becoming aware that I was on a very scratchy, stiff and uncomfortable surface, stiff like the sheets my mother would take from the clothes line many years ago, after they'd spent a day flapping in the cold autumn wind.
If I needed to do something, I wasn't interested. I felt that something bigger than I had taken over, and I was more than willing to allow it to embrace me totally. It felt good to be without responsibility or requirements to do anything...
The sleep returned, yet I seemed to be lucid.
"Kev, papa is here." I heard someone call me.
"Papa! I don't know what happened. Where am I?"
"Your body needs help, Kev. You're in a hospital. You're going to have to help your body to start working again. You're not ready to come here."
"Papa, I'm so tired. I don't think I can do anything."
"You don't have to do anything right now. Everything necessary has been done for the moment. You'll be fine...."
"How did you know I was here, Papa?"
"Your friend told us... the message on the wall, Kev... look on the wall," Papa said, but he went on speaking.
"When you wake up, you must learn how to care for yourself all over again; you won't be able to walk or do much of anything. But that will all change with time."
"I don't know what to do, Papa" I said feeling genuine alarm for the first time as he explained my predicament. "Maybe I ought to be, could be, doing something after all," I panicked.
Papa said, "Kev, easy, son... you must rest first-- for a long, long time. You must not alarm yourself. Later, you'll find out what you have to do, and you'll have plenty of time... Don't worry, son."
Papa is actually my grandpa. He died when I was four years old; so I never knew him very well. I remember I loved for him to hold me in his arms and rock me in his squeaky rocking chair, and let me fall asleep on his big belly at night. I slept in Papa's arms as peacefully as I have in this new place, where ever it is that I am. This place feels like being with papa in his rocking chair again.
And I could actually hear his big clock ticking now too. It was papa's special clock that stood at the top of the stairs on the floor in the hall, with the big ball that moved slowly from side to side making it go tick tock..., tick tock... very slowly and very quietly.
Papa would let me help him wind his clock every week, and he told me how the clock watched over him.
"I need a clock, Papa," I had once said back then. "Where can I get one, Papa?" I asked.
Now I felt a sense of panic: "Where is MY clock?" "Papa, Papa, I'm scared..."
Someone called my name again, someone I didn't know. It sounded very strange and breathy.
"Keah-nnn," the voice called.
Papa told me that I needed to do something, but he didn't say what. I didn't want to leave this very comfortable place to which I'd gone, and I didn't want to leave Papa. I just lay there not thinking, just waiting to know what to do. I had no idea what had happened to me, but maybe I'd learn that too. Eventually I decided to try to open my eyes.
I could see. My sight was bleary, but there was only one image now, not the two I had had just before I left the parking lot. But, oh, my, I was feeling exhausted once again, and didn't want to get up or even speak. I blinked several times and looked around only moving my eyes, leaving my head in one place.
I recognized that I must be in a hospital, in a hospital room, like papa said. It was pale green with long, white curtains around my bed, and a young man, dressed in orderly's greens, was looking down at me.
I didn't feel like speaking. I looked into his eyes and he smiled. Over his shoulder on the wall next to the drapery covered window I noticed some graffitti, I thought; there were hand-written words that I couldn't make out. My vision, although not in two images as it was just before I blanked out, was still not clear. I could not see the words easily, but I binked and strained and finally read them.
"Dear God, Please save my friend in the bed. He is very good and he needs help. I can't do nothing. But I will stay with him. Please tell me what to do. Thank You. Hugo"
Hugo moved over quite close to the bed and leaned over me lying there. He placed his huge body over mine and gripped my shoulders with his hands and gave me a gentle hug that calmed me to the depths of my soul and sent love coursing directly into my body. I tried to reach up to return the hug, but my arms were too heavy. I barely touched his sides...
But Hugo slid his hands down my arms and put them around mine. He squeezed my hands, and looking into my eyes, he smiled again and uttered sounds, "Oohh kaaa... Oohh Kaaa..." that I thought must mean "Okay... Everything's okay..."
I managed to smile and mouth the beginning of "Thank you....", but I never finished getting the words out before a heavy sleep washed over me, and I left again.