Dream of Death – 1

It’s not what he expected, this dying. It’s taking longer than he thought, for one thing. He’s more familiar with faster ways to die: like the abrupt heart attack that felled his father like a tree; or the fever that took his mother within a week; or the rogue bullet that claimed a classmate’s future one hunting season. But this. They saved him from a massive coronary death, yes–but just so he could go down slow, taking months. Not that he is complaining about the extra time. It’s just not what he expected.

And something else he didn’t expect, since after all it’s his heart giving out, is how his mind is unraveling. It started with the forgetting. He’d be chugging along a thought, maybe trying to say something, and then, where a word used to be, there’d be a blank, a hole, and his thoughts would just slide right down into that hole, and for a few frozen seconds his mind would be vacant, like a room after the occupant has moved out.

The problems with his memory are annoying, but what bothers him more, what scares him, is that sometimes he can’t tell if his memories are real. He’s sure he worked on a Lake Huron freighter that last summer in high school. But was he on the ship when the fire started? Did he actually witness the burning man come screaming from the hold? Or maybe he’s just remembering how he imagined that horrible death after hearing the story. And another time. He knows for sure he’d wounded a buck when he was hunting by himself that one fall in the Wasatch Mountains. He remembers it was just after a light snow, a “tracking snow”, and he must have followed the animal to finish it, but the memories of the final kill are a hodge-podge of images: running after the deer, sleeping by the carcass, shooting a coyote. All that seems unlikely, unreal, and choppy, like a dream, not a real memory. It’s as if he’s sitting helpless at his own picture show while some indifferent, wigged-out stranger in the projection booth is showing frames of truth and illusion all jumbled together. He wonders, in his lowest times, if he will lose all his memories–his story, his life, even before this slow dying is over.

Well. Enough of that.

He glances around the hospital room. The walls are painted white, decorated with one inoffensive picture of a garden scene. A small recliner covered in brown vinyl is pushed up alongside his bed. A few orange molded plastic chairs complete the décor. The rest is medical: monitors, oxygen tanks, IV stands, and tubes snaking over the floor. His wife Margie sleeps to the right of his bed in the brown recliner.

He looks down at the open book in his lap. His son had recently given him this book about the military aircraft of the 1950’s. The print is too small, too dense for his eyes to resolve, but the pictures! His hands rest on either side of the glossy, black and white photo of the C-124 Globemaster, the huge military transport plane. His memories are clear, now. In 1953, he was the navigator on the eight-man C-124 crew, flying secret Cold War missions out of Fairbanks, Alaska. “Old Shaky” was notorious for icing up, fuel tank leaks and engine fires, but he was twenty-five years old and had survived combat missions in Korea, and sure as hell didn’t see himself going down in the Arctic.

He knows there are also pictures of the B-29s, his first plane, the one he flew in the Korean War in 1951, but instead of fumbling with the slick, heavy pages to find the photos, he leans his head back on the pillow and closes his eyes.

He pictures the cramped navigator’s station of the B-29, how he’d fold his six- foot frame onto the thinly padded jump seat, click on the gooseneck lamp, and angle a focused pool of light onto the flat workspace over his knees. He’d lay out his tools: the celestial map, the astral manual, various slide-rule calculators, protractors. He’d check his logs, where he’d write precise numbers: celestial sightings, wind speeds, compass directions, and altitudes.

He wants to remember more, to fill in the details, to nail down that place, his time on earth, at least in his own mind. He imagines zipping open the pockets of his flight jacket and taking inventory. He handles each item in turn: the Camels, the picture of Margie, the Juicy Fruit chewing gum, the butterscotch Life Savers, and then, without a sign but for the flicker of his eyelid, the wet circuitry of his brain misfires, a door to another realm slams open

and he’s breathing the gas and machine oil stink of a B-29. He takes a huge gulp of air and grins, glad to breathe free of the oxygen mask now that they’re over the ocean. The heavy vibration from the props sets his bones buzzing, warming his body. The drone of the engines pulses in an easy, rocking rhythm. God, he loves to fly! The frigid air outside is viscous at this airspeed, and the props cut through it unevenly–a little jarring on the butt, but nothing serious. He folds a fresh stick of gum into his mouth and a squirt of saliva meets the sweet fruity taste. He’s content. The mission over Korea went off without a hitch. The night is clear; the stars in place.

He’s rolling his eyes at a raunchy limerick the flight engineer is garbling over the headset when he hears a curse from the cockpit and static blisters the ‘phones. He’s abruptly jerked to the left. What the hell? He realizes the plane is banking hard, like some panic maneuver to avoid flak, and that she keeps going, trying to stand on her left wing. Christ, we’re gonna roll! He jams the oxygen mask on his face and yanks the safety straps tight over his chest. But just before gravity hauls the plane out of the sky, the great aircraft steadies, yaws drunkenly, and rocks back to level. My God! He knows they’re hundreds of miles from Korea, out over the Pacific, but still: Did we take a hit?

There’s no more communication from the pilots or anyone else. Heart pounding double time to the engines’ pulse, he leans out to look up the short aisle into the cockpit. What’s lighting up the sky? Flak? Flares? The whining drone of the engines changes pitch, stuttering down the scale to a low grumble. Jesus, we’re losing power! The engines shut down. His ears pop in the silence. The blood siphons away from his face. He eases off his jump seat and crouching, creeps forward. The cockpit is empty. He slides into the pilot’s seat, thighs shaking, sets his cold hands on the yoke, and only then, raises his face to the spectacular black night writhing with color.

There, outside the paned glass of the cockpit, so close he believes he could touch them, the magnificent Northern Lights crackle and hum. Overhead, across the sky, huge standing sine waves of red and yellow hang shimmering. Lower in the sky, electric blue shafts of light pulse downward to the earth against a purple so deep it buzzes the back of his eyes. And in the midst of this flaring death of the sun’s rays, globes of luminescent green and orange explode like fireworks, only to reluctantly fade. He is exalted, but then confused, because he knows no aircraft has ever flown through the Lights. This can’t be. We’re too high. He squints at the altimeter. The needle is flat at zero.

Then, faint but unmistakable, he hears the long-range navigational radio signals, the two staccato beeps moving closer and closer in phase as the great plane begins to nose upward into the swirling magnetic night, guided silently up toward the stars. He tries to yell, but his tongue is thick in his mouth. He tries to stand, but his hips are trapped in the seatbelt. He struggles, but a hand pushes down on his shoulder. Frantic,

           he opens his eyes. The lights flatten out into a panel of white fluorescent lighting along the ceiling, and the navigational signals, phasing into one, announce the rhythm of his heart on the monitor.

His stepdaughter, Tess, straightens and takes her hand from his shoulder. She backs up a few feet along the side of the hospital bed where he lies, trailing her hand on the sheet, and regards him gravely. “You were dreaming.”

“Mmmm.” He eyes the room. Yeah, this is real, not a dream. Tess still stands in front of him. He remembers she arrived from Wisconsin just this morning. His other two children, Anna and Robert were–where? “Where’d they go?” he mumbles.

“Rob and Annie? They went to get some lunch. You need anything, Dad?”

“Ice.” He is always thirsty, but water is rationed. With his heart slowly failing, fluids pool in his body, his feet, his lungs. The less he drinks, the longer he lives.

“Here you go.” She gives him a paper cup of ice chips from the nightstand. He holds the cup up and shakes some of the ice chips into his mouth, but then it’s all too much, and his head falls back and his eyes droop shut. He feels her slip the cold cup from his fingers and hears her soles scuffing the linoleum floor and then the scrape of a chair.

The weariness, the exhaustion, has been sitting on him for so long now that he has no energy for reacting, for feeling anymore. Just a few months ago, he could work up quite a rage at the nurses when they fumbled a stick, or when food was not to his liking. And he remembers–maybe last month?–feeling despair and even some satisfying self-pity when he couldn’t push out the foul, dried-up shit that clogged his colon. And it was only a couple weeks ago when he lay on the bed next to Margie and his struggling effort to breathe, to force oxygen through his spongy, wet lungs terrified him so much that he cried out, over and over, until she woke in alarm. But now, existence is muted, weighted down by the sullen fatigue, weighted down like his useless feet swollen with edema.

Except for the dreams. He wonders about the dreams. They possess him, so vivid with emotion, and call back the time when the world slapped up against his eyes and fogged his nose and tunneled into his ears, and when he could walk–walk! But the dreams trouble him, too, because they barge into his waking reality without warning, like just now with his dream about the runaway B-29 and the northern lights. The dreams are telling him, along with the forgetting and the confusion about his memories, that he’s dying. The reason his mind is slipping, the gears not meshing, is simple: his heart is falling down on the job. There’s just not enough O-2 to the ol’ brain . . . Hunh. They say “your life passes before you” just before you die. Maybe all these crazy memories and dreams and visions are my life passing before me, but sloowwww. Maybe because I’m dying so slow? Ha! “My life is inching before me.” Heh-heh . . . Guess I’m still sharp enough to make a joke.

Army K-9 kennel, Monterey,California: 1957

Joe crept past the pen where Lady was kept, signaling her to keep silent. Since his retirement a week before, he had no authorization to be on the premises of the Army kennel, certainly not at 0245 hours. He could smell the faint, acrid scent of his own fear along with the stronger, almost skunky odor of dog urine. But he knew, in spite of the churning cramps in his stomach, what he had to do.

Without a doubt, Lady was telepathic. The ESP experiments were proof. It made sense that some of the pups in her litter had the ability, too. He knew the Army suspected as much, and he knew how they operated They could go to any lengths. A puppy could be brutally injured to find out if it would mentally “call” another dog for help. Or a pup could have its skull studded with shock electrodes in trial and error attempts to map the “telepathy center.” As an Officer and handler in the K-9 Unit, Joe had a deep connection to his dogs. He felt a sick fear thinking about what could happen to them, and then a rage so strong his world washed red.

The puppies had already been slated for preliminary ESP testing. He had no choice but to steal them and go into hiding. He wanted to steal Lady herself, but she was too highly trained, too valuable, and her disappearance would be suspect. He hated to leave her behind, but hoped she’d be spared further experimentation and used for breeding. Her puppies were a different matter.

Joe padded in his crepe-soled shoes to the room where Lady’s litter, four twelve-week old German shepherd pups, were kept in separate pens. An emergency light above the door was adequate for his dark-adapted vision. He heard the rustling of dog bedding and a soft snort.

As he stepped past each cage, the pups were sleeping except for one. Moka, a black and tan female, sat with her head cocked, eyeing him. He studied her appealing face and got that same weird hunch feeling he’d had during the ESP experiments. He suddenly knew, without knowing how, that she was the only one of the pups who had any telepathic ability. He was relieved. Stealing one dog was going to be much easier than stealing four.

In the kennel office, lit by moonlight through a high window, he pulled Moka’s file. Dating a last entry, he wrote 0400: Found dead. Acute bloat. Body incinerated. He scribbled an unreadable signature. Would the ruse be believed? Joe thought so. Since his official retirement and leaving the kennel a week ago, his position as Officer In Charge had not been filled. He remembered the urine smell in the cage room. The place was short-staffed, probably disorganized.

With Moka and a slip leash tucked in his jacket, he left the kennels and snuck back the same way he’d come, keeping to the shadows of the deserted maintenance buildings. At the chain link fence surrounding the base, he leashed Moka. He crawled under first, then encouraged her with gentle tugs to squirm through on her belly. She made no noise, seeming to understand the need for stealth.

“The steroid medication I’ve prescribed will delay the progress of the cancer, but there’s no cure. Most likely, she’ll be active and happy for another four, maybe six, weeks. Right up until the end.”

As I had been taught, I didn’t cry or protest, but fought for calm, clutching the fur of her scruff as the white room ballooned, then shrank. The rest of the vet’s words were almost lost to me under the terrible shushing of blood in my ears.

“When the end comes, it’ll be fast, within a day, most likely.”

I called her Sirocco because she was the color of sand and swept along the earth like the wind. Sirocco was my go-anywhere, best-behaved dog. She slept with her whole long body against me every night and calmed me with her meditative gaze.

I had two other dogs, both German Shepherds like Sirocco. These other two were fine dogs, but Sirocco was my favorite. Now, with her illness and so little time left, I dropped any pretense of fairness.  Sirocco got the meatiest bones and special treats, the longest play-time, the most affection. But most important, she got the dog park every morning just before dawn, every morning until the last one.

The park is 80 acres, in the countryside away from town, and just over a ridge so that the town lights cannot be seen. Bark-chipped trails wind through the central part of the park, through tall prairie grass, an occasional towering oak or hickory, and elderly apple trees still bearing. But Sirocco and I preferred to patrol the narrow, stony dirt path that follows all around the edges of the park up on the ridge where the jack pines grow and where meadows of cow parsnips space the woods. We liked that high view of the prairie below, and to circle all around the known and loved.

It was quiet, cold and dark on the ridge those early mornings. The park was often empty of other people or dogs. I rarely used a flashlight, trusting my eyes to adapt. Sirocco would disappear into the grey and black shadows of the woods to hunt. Mostly, I let her be, but if the darkness crept up my back too much, I liked to call her to me in a whisper, huffing through the silence.

“Sirocco, come!”

Arnie and I don’t have what you’d call a storybook marriage. We met a little late in life, well past any giddy expectation of finding a soul mate. Still, we feel loving toward each other, share a friendly physical affection, and have built a comfortable routine for a day-to-day life together.
But I keep a distance from him. It’s never been my way to reveal my fears and doubts. I was raised to prize self-reliance, so I don’t like to ask for help or reassurance. I hide my childish yearning to be held close and kept safe. But that mute longing to be taken care of, buried for years without light or air, is still there—shapeless and powerful— and somehow shameful for its being hidden.
So four days ago, when Death glanced my way with a casual sweep of the eyes and nailed me with terror, I didn’t tell Arnie or anyone about the hole of fear I’d been swept into and how it had closed over my head. But he must have suspected. Last night I said, “I’m thinking I want to go up north tomorrow. Up to the River Camp.” We both knew I meant to go by myself. I wanted a chance to calm my mind, to sort out my reactions to the information I’d found in a medical reference book.
Arnie stood looking at me with his thumbs hooked in his belt loops, my stolid husband of ten years. “Okay, Em,” he said.
“Just for the day.”
“Okay, Em.” He reached across the distance between us and gave my hand a quick squeeze, and I pretended not to see the anxiety on his face.