Ron's Worst Nightmares
Falling Apart
By Pat Squared
All he saw was a grey blur.
Everything he heard sounded like a horde of gigantic metallic bees buzzing about his ears.
All he felt was pain. Like someone cut him open and scoured his insides with stainless steel wool pads.
To top it all off he woke up in a metal box.
He remembered the moment he died. He remembered shaking uncontrollably choking on the tube. He remembered the doctor's voice pronouncing him dead at 1803.
He wanted to scream. He wanted to tell the world that he was still there, but his body would not obey his commands. Instinctively he withdrew into himself to protect what was left of his identity. The last thing he heard was an alarm.
He could not be alive. Hell always had a way of breaking one's spirits. The old tactic almost got him.
This new tactic was working all too well. He had believed that he was actually still alive for the moment. He heard the orderly lock him in the freezer.
He had to get out. Anyone who watched CSI or one of its many clones knew the autopsy was coming. He did not want to feel the saw cutting into what was left of him. Once he saw a video of a brain being cut open. The brains and blood was not scary. What gave him nightmare was seeing an ordinarily gentle doctor use a circular saw on the patient's skull. The sound, the whirl of the blade haunted his nightmares for years to come.
Now the devils were going to cut into his skull and feast on his brains.
As soon as he could, he fought his way out of the box. He was still alive. At least alive enough to feel pain. He hurt himself, but he got out of the box.
He wanted to run, but his body would not let him. He was so exhausted and weak that he just sat there awaiting for the next torture to take place. He finally broke. He could not imagine how hell could get any worse.
Fire and brimstone had nothing compare to what was happening in his mind.
Someone, something led him to a small room and left him there.
He waited for the next act in this place of damnation.
Even after fifteen years of practicing medicine, Dr. Samuel Goldstein knew that he did not know all the answers.
In front of him was proof that all the established rules were meant to be broken.
The doctors in the ICU pronounced him dead. According to the telemetry, the young man was dead. His heart stopped for over five minutes before the test leads were removed. He was dead.
However, sitting in the room was the man very much alive.
The other docs cut him up, patched up his body. Now it was time for Dr. Goldstein to fix the young guy's mind.
The young man was broken. He just sat there sobbing, ignoring the outside world. The IV feeding kept him from dying of starvation, but he had lost significant weight and was down sixty pounds from his post-boot camp body weight.
He looked more like a little boy than the hero responsible for saving so many lives.
The MRI told Dr. Goldstein that the brain was physically okay. There were no dead spots and in fact the brain was hyperactive even when the young man was sedated. This was not anything near a textbook case. Dr. Goldstein knew that he would have to rely on his experience and figure out how to return this young man back to some semblance of normality.
The young man was babbling in some foreign language that confused the staff. It sounded like German, but it was some obscure dialect and even the parts that Goldstein could understand did not make any sense.
Anastasia, Doll House, orange pain, black pain, Kim, sorry, soap, sock, mommy, please don't go, I tried, I tried, let me go with you.
It was the request to go somewhere that struck Dr. Goldstein the most.
It could mean many things.
The mind was anything but a logical structure. Words had the dictionary meaning and connotations associated with them from a lifetime's worth of experiences. Two plus two never equal four. The mind was a thing more twisted than Lewis Carol of Alice in Wonderland fame could ever describe.
One hundred fifty years of modern psychology, and not even its best practionersdid not even have the concept of how warpped a normal human mind could be, let alone one driven to madness.
However to explore, Dr. Goldstein had to figure out how to communicate with the distrait young marine.
It was time to visit the young man and try to break through.