I opened my eyes, expecting darkness. Instead, soft light—dim enough that it cast no shadows but bright enough to expel every shred of darkness—filled the room. Somehow, daybreak had come and gone without announcing its arrival or departure. Yet here it…something…was, an indescribable day-part that had swallowed a piece of time to which I had grown accustomed over more than seventy-one years. I had awakened to the realization that I had missed unrecoverable moments. Never would I know, with certainty, what the experience would have been like, had I been awake. The probability was high that the missing moments would have been virtually indistinguishable from hundreds and hundreds of other moments I had experienced…but likelihood and certainty can be as different as night and day. I had no way of knowing exactly how this experience differed from all those other experiences. Memory was the only clue available to me, but we all know how utterly unreliable memory can be. And memory is of no use whatsoever when its switch is set to “off.” So, in reality, I could rely on no clues. None. If I had been able to dredge up a memory, it might have been something artificial; a dream crafted by a mind operating at less-than-capacity. My sub-par, barely functioning brain probably could not be trusted to replicate an experience I had never had. I could rely on it only to create almost inaudible conversations taking place in distant rooms, behind closed bank-vault doors. I recognized those voices, but not all the words they used. They whispered, as if lowering the volume of their indistinct utterances would disguise the sounds. They were right, of course. I could only make out a few of the words; enough, though, to realize they were planning on performing an illegal surgery on me, without my consent. I could hear one of the speakers slide on a pair of leather welder’s gloves, her voice getting giddy with excitement over what she was about to do. Her companion, who I surmised was a forensic accountant, tapped the number keys of an ancient calculator. My concern, experienced through a foggy mist of anesthesia, was that neither of them had been properly trained in the administration of anesthetics; and that I would be fully awake and able to feel excruciating pain for the full duration of the surgical procedure. That procedure, I learned from listening to their banter, would involve replacing my right kidney with a mechanical device that had kept Sergio Mendez alive during his battle with long COVID. This was nonsense, of course, but it was so damn vivid I could not dismiss it as simple hallucination. There are no “simple” hallucinations, by the way. Hallucinations are, by their very nature, complex reconfigurations of a labyrinthine web of pre-experiential nerve adjustments. But that is neither here nor there. The point is this: light and darkness belong in the same chapter as the prologue, which competes with theft and altruism.
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My conversation with the hospice nurse yesterday was not particularly informative. He was a nice guy, but I remain unsure why he was referred to me and he was unable to enlighten me. Before he left, he set up an appointment for me with a palliative care nurse. With each passing day, I become less certain of what the future holds. That’s probably a good thing. I measure time by the number of pills left in the bottle. Time is refreshed with each prescription, whether new or refilled. Yet time is a finite resource…if, indeed, it is either finite or a resource. I still wonder about the purpose of time and how we would cope with the world around us in the absence of all the measures of time. Would we notice its absence? Do we notice when we have “too much time on our hands?” Do we know what, exactly, that phrase means? We live in an eternal state of confusion…until we die, at which point we can no longer communicate the extent to which we are perpetually confused.
