Tunnel Vision Read Online Free PDF Page B

asked Damian.
    Damian didn’t respond but stood transfixed, studying Zack’s face.
    “Whatever it is, it’s a good sign,” said the nurse. The aide agreed, her cell phone in her hand presumably to call the resident. “Hey, Zack, your mom’s here. So are Anthony and Damian. Time to wake up. You can do it. Open your eyes.”
    More mutterings from Zack as his head rolled slightly on the pillow. Maggie put her ear close to his mouth as he continued muttering strange syllables. “He’s saying something. He’s saying words.”
    “Does he know a foreign language?” the nurse asked.
    “He took a year of Spanish, but that’s not what it sounds like.”
    Anthony leaned over Zack. “Hey, bro, it’s Anthony. Come out of there. We got some partying to do.”
    But Zack made no response to the promptings, just continued muttering.
    “It’s just gibberish,” Anthony said. “I do that when I sleep, too.”
    “No, it’s not,” Damian whispered. “He’s speaking in tongues.”
    “Tongues. What’s that?” Anthony asked.
    “Glossolalia.”
    “Glossowhat?”
    “Glossolalia,” Damian said in a voice barely audible. “The Holy Spirit is speaking through him.”
    “Cut the crap,” Anthony said as the nurse’s aide gawked at Zack. “It’s nothing.”
    Damian nodded and fell silent.
    Through a broken voice, Maggie continued to beg Zack to wake up, but after several minutes he fell silent again.
    And anguish raked through her soul as Zack’s mouth stopped moving and his eyes fell still and he sank back into a deep sleep.
    Although there were no changes in him, the nurse said it was a good sign that he tried to talk, tried to break through. There would be another time.
    She and the aide replaced his IV and checked the monitors. Then the others resumed their vigil around Zack in his coma as acceptance settled over them like snow.
    “False alarm,” the nurse said, and left the room.

8
     
    No false alarm. He could hear voices.
    His first thought was that he was dreaming. That he was in bed in his apartment, and faceless people were in his room telling him it was time to get up and go to class, to work on his thesis—his deadline was closing in—to get a job, to stop gambling …
    Voices. Lots of them, some he recognized. His mother. Aunt Kate. Anthony. Damian. Geoff. Beth Howard, his nurse. Also voices he didn’t recognize telling him dumb stuff like to wiggle his toes and squeeze their fingers and open his eyes. He tried to tell them that he was stuck in a foolish dream, that he’d wake soon and get hustling.
    But as in all dreams, he had no control. He could hear them but couldn’t respond. Couldn’t open his eyes. Couldn’t move. It was as if he had become afflicted with some kind of paralysis. But that happened in dreams, like his legs freezing when he was being chased. He couldn’t just shake himself awake. And just as weird was how things moved in dreams, how the familiar world took on non-Cartesian logic, non-Euclidian geometry, and how gravity could be suspended.
    Like the snap of a finger, he found himself bodiless and floating above his bed—
    no, not his bed, not the one in his apartment, with the blue paisley spread his mother had bought, but a bed all in white in a strange room with colorless walls and IVs dripping and flickering, beeping machines—
    and all those people were standing around him making demands. He could see them. And he could see himself in the bed, but from above, as if he were some kind of ectoplasm hovering in the air, and below was himself: dead asleep, eyes shut, face colorless and shrunken, head roughly shaven and cocked on a pillow, arms gaunt and limp by his sides, with tubes and wires running from them and his gut to drips and bags and monitors like so many umbilical cords.
    A hospital room, of course. He was asleep in a hospital room for unknown reasons.
    And his mother was holding his hand and weeping. Also Anthony—a big guy with pecs like gladiator plates and