Day 4 - Gold

“They were young,” the voice said, “and every single one of them was irresponsible and proud of it, with dreams and hopes and after a few rounds of that rotgut whiskey they drink they were all gonna solve all the world’s problems, just like always. 

“I knew the drill.  I was one of them.  I was there.  But I wasn’t there, not like them, but hey you gotta go with the flow, you know?  Isn’t that the way, Ray? 

“I’d done gone into Vietnam before anyone even thought we’d be setting up perimeters there, and then the years and the war happened and we had all been there and most of us had made it back and some… some of us didn’t…  and I felt… you know - alone.  I was there but I wasn’t, I never had been, all those years… so much inside, so what was I to do except just move through it all like I always did, like a ghost, feeling the weight of the burden of so many necessary little secrets. You’re damn right I felt like that.  But Gene he was really the one with the real burden.”

“Gene?” I asked.

“Ah…”  The voice said and the man on the bed smiled and it didn’t occur to me that he maybe shouldn’t have been smiling if he was actually in a coma and if it all happened again I’d be sure to pick up on that but at the time, at that moment, I don’t know, I just didn’t think of it as strange.  I had expected him to smile and he did, that’s all. 

“I see something’s missing from your big picture.” the voice said, and even though the body was just lying there like that, like it had always been lying there, somehow it subtly seemed to change, not just the smile fading but some sense of its presence seemed to transform, from seeming only to be just there to seeming to pull back into itself…

But it was the eyes – they were suddenly different, not cloudy and unfocused but becoming somehow full of fire and glow and life and what I mean even to say was a very distinct sense of mischief in them.  Something there, something note there, something missing,  like one of a thousand somethings.

“Did they tell you about Mae?” the voice asked.

“Mae…” I said, “yeah, Mae, the little girl who died… No one’s really told me much about her…

“It might be because the story has it that it was a terrible night and it left us all with scars that we all still live with.”

I had a passing thought that he had said “we” and I wondered if it included me in the we or for that matter how he could be included in the we if he was in a coma but then again we don’t know much about comas do we, and this coma-body was, I even then was hoping, not where the voice was coming from, and as far as myself, I wondered if scars from someone else’s past could somehow be transferred, transformed, or in some way re-associated…

The voice cut off the thought.

“On the ice,” it said.  “We were all there.  It was a big night out, and it all culminated out on the river 39 miles out of town in the strangest of circumstances, and yeah, Mae was there, her father had taken her along for the drive, to what was ultimately a meeting by the river… seen to be a spur of the moment sort of thing, everyone head out to the river, you know?  A crazy get-together in the dead of winter out on the ice in the middle of a frozen river – just like everyone does, right?  Or just some crazy-ass vets doing stupid-ass things.  But hey, they had a point, really.  They had a purpose. It was supposed to be the end and the beginning of so many things…The last piece of a puzzle and the first moment of completeness...  But something went wrong – and Stimms, he’s only ever seen one side…”

“Stimms?” I thought, suddenly on edge.  How the hell does Stimms fit into this?  How the hell does he know about Stimms?  How many sides are there?

“How many sides are ever possible?” the voice said as if reading my thoughts.  “As many as can ever be imagined.  Even mine is just one of many.  But I have an advantage, because if I was just there to be there, I wasn’t playing any role any more than to just be lingering on the peripheries, and that’s what I did, and I saw everything. And felt everything.  It was 1974 at just about this time of year.  And cold – shit, it was a lot colder than this weather I can tell you that.  Man it was cold.  But I had just returned and I wasn’t gonna let a snap of cold ruin the party.  But even so, it all happened so quickly, and it was dark and flashlights got flashing about like tracers and even though I’d been through so many of those crazy nights it had never been in my own country, and never with my friends, and it took me off-guard, but still, I know what I saw.”

“So tell me,” I asked, “what is it that you saw?”  I no longer cared who I was speaking to or where the voice was coming from.  I glanced around the room, looking for speakers up in the corners, maybe some small electronic-looking objects hanging from the ceiling, who knows what a voice-emitting whatever could look like these days, but I didn’t see anything and felt like I was gaining a new respect for this whole adventure.  It was something in the tone of the voice, the mood it was creating, with or without a body.  Very real, very immediate, actually very impressive.

“Most people don’t usually benefit from knowing everything that goes on.” the voice said, and I nodded, craziness or wisdom or a random thought that just happened to be sounding right.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Well, like if people knew what they were really actually seeing, if they didn’t just see everyone as stray bits and pieces of lives but saw how they all fit together, most likely they wouldn’t know what to do with all that information.  Information is like gold, it runs in veins of rock as something that isn't so much made or formed in nature as much as it is a part of the whole mix of the things that make up all of earth's structure.”

I don’t know, I said to myself.  I don’t know what I’m doing here. 

I paused, looked around and then I said aloud, “This body… It’s not alive, is it.”