From the personal Journals of Dr. Michael S. Pitt
1985 June, Malibu
8:00 am.
Mick Mason was running twenty minutes late to the meeting. Meeting scheduled 9:15. Mason’s trying to manufacture new minutes and seconds with reckless, volatile speed. He nearly misses the (access road) and Laurel Canyon Blvd., fishtailing back and forth and throttling up to compensate. Ten abdomen-squeezing minutes on the LCB and he’s gained Route Five, booking north at 120. Multi-multi-tasking, he’d already answered six phone calls and made six more. In between he sent texts to ten different people and replied to the replies of three of those. He was in the middle of reply number four, negotiating the snaky mountain roads with his knees, when his wife’s ring tone came burbling out of his BlackBerry.
“I don’t want you to worry for me cause I’m all right, I don’t want you to tell me it‘s time to come home…”
His wife, testy after a three-day anger jag. She said:
Why are you calling?
He didn’t know what to say, so he said:
Kate…
Why are you calling? You’re standing outside an office on the 8th floor. You can’t have a cell phone up there.
Kate…
So hang up, and don’t fucking call me back until you’re in the car on the way back!
Kate don’t…
She hung up.
…Hang up.
He drove on.
***
Fourteen miles up the road. Mason already finished with cancelling. No reason to go into town now, so he pulled off to a scenic overlook and thought about how best to avoid his girlfriend for the next few days. He came to a dusty stop in the supercharged air of a typically perfect So Cal morning. Crossing the highway to look at the waves, he started to think maybe he’d spend the time right here at the overlook. He could see the railing of a flight of stairs down to the beach. He had weed and coke in the car.
Within ten minutes he’d changed into flip flops. Then he’s bounding down the big stairs, spreading a blanket and stuffing sticky, minty smelling weed. He put a t-shirt over his head to buffer the weed ignition from the breezy shore. He Inhaled deeply, and almost instantly coughed up a symphony. Angry red stinging in his throat. His head was swimming, couldn’t get a breath. But, in time, the symphony slowly becomes a chamber group, then a soloist. His head pulsed. He closed his eyes.
***
He had a dream. In it, he was being lifted, carried like a little baby. He rode along, enjoying the stress-less ease of being carried and supported. He moaned. He laughed. He belched loudly. Then the thing carrying him took flight and surfed great blusters until his view was of the whole world, blue and brown under white smudges. A great understanding unfolded in his mind and as they flew farther and farther away from the earth, he began to see that the space around the planet wasn’t space at all. Shapes began to form and move soundless through the void. Then he could make out color differential, and larger features. He began to identify species. Crustacean, Fish, Mammal. A grey, toothy thing he’d never seen before, humans too, swimming around in the infinite liquid. The globe faded back into the darkness and there was only sea and it‘s denizens. He heard a noise coming from one of them, he couldn’t tell which. The noise was painfully loud, and he knew it wouldn’t be long before his inner ear imploded like a red dwarf star. He searched his view for the source of the offensive klaxon wailing but the shadows were blurry, indefinite. It was getting darker and he was sinking deeper, but the sound was getting louder and instead of one long bleeeeeeeet, it became a series of shorter tones, choppy and halting. It sounded almost like begging. Then the falling motion stopped. They were suspended in complete darkness.
***
He knew right away he was in a hospital. Before he opened his eyes, the sounds and smells around him told the story. Beeping from EKG monitors, clinking from the tray collection, plastic booties slipping against tiles. When he was a twenty-three he’d volunteered in a children’s ward reading and telling stories. He’d gather together fifteen/twenty kids, put out some pizza and lemonade, and just start talking. Within a few minutes they’d all be staring at him, hanging on his words. They cried and complained every time he left the ward, and cheered loudly when he returned to lay out more of this story or that. He liked to think back on it, remind himself that he hadn’t spent all of his time on earth in pursuit of his own ridiculous ends. Maybe there were children at this hospital, he thought. Maybe they need volunteers. Maybe I have a few stories left…
And then he opened his eyes.
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