THE WAY IT WENT DOWN: AWAKE AGAIN

I write it all down, but the words that wait for me when I pick my journal (so real, leather, smells of coffee with a red bookmark) remain gibberish. They are not that way when I write them down. The words feel so real. Almost as if they are the only real thing here. Despite this truth, the language runs like wet paint, and I cannot recall what I put down there the time before. I do remember the last place I sat and wrote was warm, with the smell of cinnamon and the feeling of a fire burning somewhere in an otherwise cold house, but I can't recall where that was, or when exactly, except before. At some point, the armies came, and as the shelling began, I picked up my belongings (and did my journal have a blue bookmark?) and left, on foot, in the dead of a summer's night. Listening as the crickets droned, pausing after each distant shell blast, walking the night road.

Something wouldn't let me see the house I had come from, but I could see across the night-lit vale, past the shadow of trees, to distant, pulsing lights. Booms that carried across the world like the words of god. I think I stood and watched the sorties for a bit. 

Now I wake in a rainy field and I still can't shake the feeling of exhaustion. The sky is low and close and gray, but yet somehow still bright. I open my journal, and it loads quickly, showing—surprisingly—the date, Jun 18—and the cursor blinking. I type as fast as I can, without thinking, and then review. I slept at a farmhouse and wandered off at the height of summer only to wake in a field in the middle of what feels like October. For a moment, something very clear rises in my mind. A vision.

A woman stands in my view, holding an odd crown. It is metal, with tines of copper wires running from it, and the portion that will touch my skin (is touching my skin?) set with tiny beads of rubber. I can see a piece of masking tape on the inside of the crown, and it says "left lead occipital." The woman smiles, and her front right tooth is discolored as if it had died sometime before. "Michael?" She says, seeming familiar to me in some odd way, though I'm sure I don't know her.

"Are you ready?"

"Ready," I say. The vision fades. I write this down too, breaking the narrative with it (and what does it matter, tomorrow the journal will be gibberish, anyway). Now, just the field. The grass ripples with the wind in curls, looping away from me in fractal patterns. A drizzle of cold water sprays me with each wind blast, but the feeling isn't one of discomfort. It's of waking up. 

I feel very cold. This feeling rises in me until I have to close the journal and stand up. I pocket the journal and cap my pen and slip it in my pocket, and look around. The field is green and cold. The rain begins in earnest. Then, I see it.

Across the field, perhaps a half mile distant an irregular object. Though I don't know why I'm excited, I run towards it. It warms me, the run. I feel wet and cold and overheated at the same time. When I arrive, I lay my hand on it before I even register what it is.

It's a steel cabinet, as tall as me, standing in the middle of the field. It rocks a little bit when I lean on it. A sticker on the front says NUKE THE WHALES. That seems familiar. Then I see, twenty-five feet from it, a tipped over chair. I jog over to it. I pull it up from the wet grass as the wind roars in my ears and the sky completely opens up. Rain is pouring down now. 

Further on, through the torrential rain, a metal hospital bed in the field.

Copper wires cluster and run in odd half-loops towards the bed, and as I get closer, I can hear people—distantly—shouting; "It's time to wake up now, John." "Hello! Hello!" "Wake up now, John! Wake up!"

A man is in the bed. 

I get five steps towards it and then stop. The rain is roaring. The wind whips it in my eyes, and I keep wiping them, looking at the figure in the bed, nothing more than a blurred lump under a white cover. 

I turn and run away from the bed. First, the rain slows and then stops. The wind dies down. And finally, when I cross into the trees, the air seems to bloom with sudden heat. Bugs flit in the air, and finally, sunlight dapples down through the canopy, lighting my way. 

I feel good. I mean, I feel awake again. Finally.