The Law of Nines

Everything looked soft and fuzzy, unreal, distant, dim. He could hear snatches of sounds but he didn’t know what they were. Figuring out what the sounds were didn’t strike him as at all important.

He was aware of the world all around him, but it seemed far away, not something he was a part of. He was alone . . . somewhere else.

His whole body tingled in a thick, numb, twilight way.

With the way that everything seemed less than real, it occurred to him that he might actually be asleep and only dreaming that he was awake. He couldn’t decide which was true. He didn’t know how to find the solution to such a puzzle.

Try as he might, Alex could not, simply could not, form a complete, coherent thought.

Fragments of ideas, bits of things that seemed as if they might be important, floated beyond his mental reach. He couldn’t pull them in, couldn’t make those fragments come together into a complete thought. He knew that he should be able to, knew what he wanted to do, but his mind wouldn’t make it happen. He could not exert enough willpower to bring himself to think.

It felt like his brain was shut off. He struggled to form a complete sentence in his mind, but his mind could not pull anything together. He would start a thought, but it would trail off into nothing as his brain simply failed to complete the task. He could not coax it to stay on track, to work, to think. Monumental effort didn’t help.

Somewhere in the back of his mind his inability to form complete thoughts, to think deliberately, was giving rise to a vague, distant, claustrophobic panic. Those feelings, even as they began to surface, sank back down into the black depths of indifference, never to fully surface, leaving only fuzzy emptiness.

The panic somewhere inside him could not manifest itself into something solid enough to concern him.

Alex wanted to be angry, but there was nothing there to form anger.

Every time he struggled to feel emotion, he only fell back into feeling nothing.

He turned his dim perception away from the futile effort and realized that he was sitting in a chair. He tried to get up, but his body didn’t respond. With great effort he looked down to see his hand resting on the arm of the chair. He tried to lift it, but it only levitated a few inches. He couldn’t make himself care enough to accomplish the simple task.

He squinted, trying to make out the fuzzy white shape not far away, trying to understand what it was doing.

“You awake, Alex?”

He thought it was a woman’s voice.

Answering was too unimportant to even try.

“I’ll have your bed made in a jiff. Then I’ll let you be so you can get your rest.”

That was what she was doing: making up a bed. She was tucking in sheets. Just grasping that much of the mystery around him felt like a profound accomplishment, but the accomplishment failed to be satisfying.

He didn’t know if he knew the woman in white. He couldn’t make himself concentrate on her face long enough to tell. His gaze kept sinking to the floor. The gray swirls in the linoleum echoed his thoughts.

He wanted to break down in tearful despair at not understanding any of it, but there was nothing in him that knew how to cry, so he could only sit and stare.

“I’ll let the doctor know you’re awake. I’m sure that when he makes his rounds he’ll want to stop in and see you. Okay, hon?”

The woman came closer. She pulled a tissue from the box on the windowsill, then leaned toward him and wiped the side of his mouth and chin.

“That better?” she asked as she threw the tissue in the wastebasket beside the chair.

Alex wanted to say something, but nothing came to mind.

She touched his shoulder sympathetically before moving away. The square of light darkened. He wondered distantly if maybe she had gone out and shut the door.

Snippets of things echoed through his head, fragments of conversations, flashes of sights. He sat unmoving as the obscure turmoil tumbled inside him.

He wondered where he was and how he had come to be there. He couldn’t think it through, couldn’t come up from the depths toward the distant surface. He wanted to get up out of the chair, but it seemed too monumental a task.

The world kept going dark. Each time he again became aware, he realized that he must be nodding off.

As he sat staring, going in and out of consciousness, the daylight behind him gradually went dark.

“Alex?”

It was a man’s voice. Alex lifted his head a little and realized that he must have been asleep again. He blinked slowly, trying to clear his vision. It took great effort to blink, but it didn’t help.

The man leaned down toward him. “Alex, hi, how are you doing?” The man had a clipboard in one hand. A stethoscope hung around his neck. He had on a white coat and a blue tie. Alex couldn’t muster the will to look up enough to see the face.

The man picked up Alex’s hand and shook it. Alex was too limp to participate.

“I’m Dr. Hoffmann, Alex. I’ve met you before. Remember? In the past we’ve discussed your mother.”