Stolen Souls

90

IT ALL CAME at Lennon as flashes of light, images, tableaux, faces, smears of waking, all of it punctuated by the pain.

First the sky, lost in fog, but all the blacker for it. Then the policemen gathered around him, fingers in his mouth, his head moving through no will of his own. The need to cough, and the agony as it seemed to tear him in two.

Next, the inside of the ambulance, lights so bright they cut into his skull and burrowed into his brain. The paramedics busy around him, the oxygen mask that made him feel as if he were drowning.

Then the hospital, more lights, nurses and doctors, more probing, the urgent voices, the bloody swabs, a long needle that pierced his chest, whines and beeps, then a constant high tone, like a string made of cotton and noise that stretched on and on until it faded to black, and he thought of Ellen and how he wished he’d known her all her life, and Susan with her sad eyes and how he’d like to see them once more, but the darkness was so warm, like a bed on a cold morning and—

Then a lightning crack, and he was back with the pain and the bright, punishing lights, then another mask, and he was gone again.