Sleeper Seven (3 page)

Jess herself,
however, that is, her consciousness, appeared to be just dandy. Confused, she took inventory, and found she had retained all her limbs with nary a scratch to be found. She even wore the same clothing as the body below, only perfectly clean and unbloodied. Her attention was drawn away from this self-evaluation by the wailing of multiple sirens: it seemed every squad, ladder truck and ambulance throughout the city had been activated and summoned to the scene.

Two police cruisers, zig-zagging through traffic on the highway beside the tracks, skidded to a stop sideways, blocking all four lanes. Three burly cops emerged and ambled over a four-foot chain-link fence separating the highway from the CTA right-of-way before climbing up the embankment towards the train. By this time, many of the passengers had disembarked onto the narrow path beside the train, some of them shouting and pointing towards where Jess' body lay. The officers, ignoring their pleas, shoved past them, one boarding the train while the other two carefully approached the front of the lead car with guns drawn. Observing no activity within, one officer holstered his pistol and climbed up to peer into the windshield. After ruling out terrorism in favor of a medical emergency, they radioed a request for the jaws of life, and only then did one of the cops take any interest in her body.

Keeping his gun drawn, the officer skidded down the embankment into the gully to where her body was sprawled out in the brush. Holstering his gun, he scrambled towards it, issuing a "
Jesus
" between heavy breaths. He had seen enough dead bodies to know what they look like.

The EMT's, close behind, maneuvered a stretcher through the craggy path from the highway to her body. Jess found it slightly amusing how much of a fuss was being made — she wasn't down
there,
she was up on the tracks, and felt just fine. More than fine. Taking a moment, she examined this new state of hers. Where a moment before she was full of adrenaline, in pain, drenched with sweat, and almost sick to her stomach, she now had none of those concerns. She felt calm, had no pain or nausea, no worry, and nary a drop of sweat. Everything was just grand.

Something began to take hold in her consciousness, however, something just on the tip of her tongue — something she was forgetting, as if she had just awoken from sleep with a fading swirl of emotion, and was desperately trying to remember the dream from which it sprang. Then it hit her, and in an instant she became aware of the strangeness of feeling absolutely no concern for her body below. She needed that body to
live,
and right now she wasn't alive — not in the conventional sense of the word. Apparently, she reasoned, she was
dead
.

Panic set in as she tried to move closer to that pale, mangled contraption that was her body below. The effort was made more difficult with the discovery that she wasn't exactly
walking
along the railroad bed; she was
gliding
over it instead, and had difficulty controlling her movement. Her anxiety increasing, she desperately began to swim down through the air towards her body. As she painstakingly closed the distance, she overheard the cop tell the arriving EMT: "Take your time, she's gone" — sending her further into despair.

A few feet away now, she felt a revulsion towards this twisted wreck; there was no way she wanted to go back in
that,
but the thought of losing the rest of her life terrified her more than the disgust she felt. Positioning herself a few inches over her body as best she could, she closed her eyes, and willed herself to feel her legs, arms, torso, head — anything to reconnect to her human senses again. Within a few moments, a small tug at the back of her head burgeoned into a violent pull as she was yanked downward — head first, then torso, then limbs — and snapped back into place with a
thunk,
like a ping-pong ball caught in a vacuum cleaner.

As her previous state of pure consciousness solidified within her body, she felt every cell of her being newly burdened with a distinct weight and thickness, a heaviness, a substantiality, a
humanity;
and it was, frankly, disgusting to her. This process of unification was accompanied by numerous high-pitched, descending tones, reminiscent of a poorly auto-tuned song, which finally resolved into a chorus of shouting voices and sirens.

And then came the pain.

~ 5 ~

"W
elcome back, sweetie."

Her eyes slowly opened, and after a few blinks, the cloudy haze cleared to reveal the smiling face of a nurse in blue scrubs.

"I'll be right back, don't you go nowhere," she ordered, quickly shuffling out of the room. Jess could feel the pain lingering just behind whatever painkillers she had been given; a dull ache that she knew would catch fire once the drugs wore off. Bandages covered her arms and legs, and a sling supported her right arm, but she found, with relief, no Plaster of Paris anywhere.

The nurse reappeared as promised, joined by three doctors: an older man followed by two young interns — one male, one female — who stood behind him like children hiding from an overly-affectionate aunt. The elder doctor approached and flicked a light back and forth between her eyes.

"Good evening, young lady. You're back from your trip, eh?"

She tried to muster a "Guess so", but her throat and mouth felt terribly dry, so it came out more like "Guckth...".

"Do you know where you are? Do you know what happened to you? And
who
you are, for that matter?"

"Uh, ahem, yeah...train wreck," she managed, trying to force a swallow.

"Well now, you're not
that
bad off, considering," the doctor replied, misunderstanding her answer. In the meantime, the male intern, overcoming his fear, walked around him to stand at the other side of her bed.

"You
expired,
you know," he informed her, a touch of amazement in his voice.

What a strange, rude, word,
Jess thought to herself,
Talking about me like sour milk
. She frowned at him, as did the older doctor before quickly changing the subject.

"Ah, how are you feeling...any pain?"

"Huh uh."

"Well you rest up now, we'll check back on you in a bit." He rose, noted something on her chart, and after instructing the nurse to provide only ice chips, left with the female intern in tow.

The young man lingered, however, staring at her awkwardly as he backed away towards the door. It seemed he wanted to say something, but after a long moment, he turned and left as well.

She dozed on and off for a few minutes, or a few hours — she couldn't tell which — until awakening to a visitor entering the room.

"Hey, Messy! They said you were in and out, you in?"

"Gavin," she squeaked, turning her head to see him. He giggled, and grabbing a styrofoam coffee cup from the table next to her bed, offered her some partially-melted ice chips. Taking them, she smiled an icy smile at him.

"Lady, don't you worry, I made it clear to them that there is no dying in here for you today, so you got zero worries, I got you covered."

"What happened?" she whispered, wondering how much he knew of what she remembered.

"You crawled out on a train, you damn fool! Trying to be all
Wonder Woman
or something. Don't ya remember? Then they shut down the power and you went all
Air Jess
." He whistled while drawing an arc in the air with his finger, and punctuated it with a
Pop,
eliciting a wince from her.

"You got a dislocated shoulder, three bruised ribs, and of course this," he said, sprinkling his fingers back and forth over her bandaged body, "...this is all branchy and scratchy and just plain ol'
crazy,
but other than that, you're all good."

She realized from his description that they didn't know
she
had stopped the train, or that she had in fact...
died
...for a few minutes, at least.

~ 6 ~

A
fter the short visit, she slept fitfully through the evening and into the night, as vivid dreams of the entire eight-minute drama replayed in her mind. In some variations the train derailed, in others it barreled into the platform at the end of the line, but in none of them did things turn out as well as they had in reality. What did remain constant in each dream version was the moment of impact, when she was torn from her body, and into that place of peace and detached observation.

Shooting pains in her side dragged her consciousness to the surface, and groaning, she opened her eyes to find it was 3:30 AM. She lay there half-asleep, the jolts of pain intensifying as the meds slowly wore off. Finally, unable to take any more, her hand began to reach for the call button, when with a
thunk,
the discomfort instantly receded.

The pain was replaced with a gentle tickling sensation, which started at the base of her spine and worked its way up, spreading across her back. It then morphed into a soft, fuzzy feeling, whereupon it changed again into something more metallic and sharp, but not painful. The relief from the pain was so great that instead of analyzing these strange new sensations, she simply enjoyed them as they rose through her body and floated away.

Gradually becoming aware of a slow, methodic, deep breathing, she remembered her single-occupancy room, and upon opening her eyes, was annoyed to discover that not only had she been moved while asleep, but that she was now in the lower portion of a bunk bed, with another patient sleeping above her! Her annoyance turned to bewilderment as she looked around and found herself actually lying on the floor underneath a single bed. She slowly rolled out from underneath, careful not to wake the person above, and stood, only to gaze down upon her own sleeping form.

This must be the most realistic dream I have ever had,
she thought. She hadn't had one like this since her teens, when she read a book on lucid dreaming and started experiencing a few on occasion, but she soon lost the ability as her interest in the subject waned.

The strange thing about this dream was her ability to ponder it — her previous lucid dreams quickly collapsed, awakening her, if she actively thought about them too much. But not this time — she even said to herself
I am asleep and dreaming, and I am fully aware of this,
yet the dream kept progressing without any dissolution.

Well this is certainly new and unique,
she marveled, and she decided to see what else she could get away with in this dream state before it all inevitably fell away from her. Turning away from her slumbering body, she glided — she noted she could glide in this dream — towards the door. Grabbing for the handle, she felt only the sensation of metal, as her hand, finding no purchase, passed right through it.

Intrigued, she gently pushed on the large wooden door, only to have her fingers sink into it, creating a cold, dense, fibrous feeling within them. Pulling her hand out abruptly, she then punched at the door, sinking her fist into it up to her wrist, which produced only a faint knock.

OK,
she thought to herself, retracting her hand,
let's tell this lucid dream who's boss. I want this door to open...now!
she commanded, yet it stubbornly ignored her.
This is supposed to be
my
reality,
she thought, confusion and frustration setting in. Slowly and carefully, she slid her arm all the way through the door, as though reaching out to pet a strange dog. With no resistance all the way to her shoulder, she dipped her head forward, unsure if her dream-state awareness would be affected by this intermingling of substances. Reminding herself it was only a dream, she mustered her courage and dove in.

As she had predicted, her consciousness
was
affected by the intermingling with the door material: her vision blurred as an atonal mixture of randomly changing frequencies assaulted her hearing. Noticing no ill-effect on her awareness, however, she bobbed her head slowly back and forth through the door, finding the strangeness only occurred when the door material intermingled with the areas of her brain in charge of those particular senses, as opposed to the physical sense organs themselves. For example, if she moved her head through facing forwards, she could still "see" the door even when her "eyes" exited the other side; it was only when the back of her head, containing her occipital lobes, entered the door that the visual dulling effects manifested.

Feeling more confident, she quickly stepped through the door and into the hospital hallway. This action produced a jumble of sensations internally, but nothing externally, save for a faint
thump
. Standing in the hall, she discerned the noise of shuffling papers, and turning to discover the source, spotted a nurse's station down the hallway. The shuffling stopped as someone's head leaned out over the station desk and looked directly at her. Startled, she froze, hoping she wouldn't be noticed. The nurse, staring intently, caught her breath and waited a few moments before speaking.

"Plymouth? That you making the rounds? You sure gave me a start there, you gotta quit with that now."

Relieved she wasn't in trouble, Jess was nevertheless confused as to why she was being addressed as Plymouth. As the nurse returned to her paperwork, Jess relaxed and headed down the cold tile hallway towards the desk, stopping unnoticed directly in front of her. After a few moments, the nurse appeared to sense Jess standing before her, and pausing her busywork, gathered herself and quickly looked up.

"Uh!" she uttered, falling back in her chair. Recovering herself, she rose, and without acknowledging Jess, turned and quickly walked away while holding her hands to the sides of her head like blinders.

"No. No. No. No. No. Uh-uh, that is NOT ok, I told you...I told you...Uh-uh," she muttered, kicking through the double doors at the end of the hall.

This dream is just getting freaky now,
Jess thought as she returned to the door of her room. Hearing another door open further down the hall, however, she watched a doctor dressed in blue jeans and a white coat emerge from it. Recognizing him as the young intern from earlier, she froze as he approached, wondering if he would bust her for being out of her room in this super-realistic dream.