Two summers ago in the black night of Brooklyn
I spewed several liters of blood into the bathroom tub.
After wiping the retch from my face
More blood surged from my body.
Something was not right.
Something was very wrong.
I crossed the East River.
Inside the NYU’s emergency room.
The staff took one look at my face.
A scrum of nurses, technicians, and doctors sped my body into ICU.
Hands stripped my body nude.
“Sir, can you hear me?” asked a young intern.
Nod.
“You are bleeding to death from the varices in your stomach.”
“Varices?”
“Small fissures. Do you have any family in New York?”
Head shakes from side to side.
“Do you want to be revived?”
“From the dead?”
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
An oxygen mask covered my mouth and nose.
“If you have any prayers, say them.”
“Aathegue.”
The Celtic word held no meaning to Christians.
The hiss of gas.
Profopol.
Blackness swarmed my consciousness.
I was dead on the other side of life.
White light.
Nothing, only white.
There was something else.
Eternal nothingness times zero equals zero.
This was death and I was cool with that.
And then I was back.
Life.
Here.
Pain.
The Here was not my own bed.
This had not been a dream.
I sucked air.
The other patient in the room.
Not breathing.
Never again.
Hospital.
Nurse.
Doctor.
An earnest doctor.
“You were very lucky. We stopped the bleeding.”
“I like luck.”
“But I have bad news.”
Plenty of bad news.
Cancer, cirrhosis, the looming threat of death.
I was seventy.
Alone in a hospital bed in a city of millions.
Bad news.
I was not dead not alive.
But straddling eternity.
No fear
I had died before.
Car crashes.
Beatings.
Broken hearts.
Whatever didn’t kill me made me wish it was dead.
This time same.
Why fight for life?
Why not give up?
Morphine made surrender easy.
Five days later I was released.
My friends saw death in my eyes.
My children in Sri Racha prayed
That I will live forever.
People believed in life eternal.
I once believed the same.
Not now.
I had had a good life.
Maine, the South Shore, the East Village, Paris, Thailand, Africa.
Months passed.
Jaundice, weight loss, pain predicted by my last days.
Then a miracle.
Yulemas
An available transplant.
That night I was in the OR.
The room cuts to black.
Clear light.
I know it well.
No gods, no heaven, no hell.
Nowhere. Nothing. No one.
The white light of death.
I was gone again.
My body on a chopping block.
Parts scattered.
Like a beef slaughtered in Smithfield Market.
Then I come back to life.
Antiseptic smell.
Clean sheets
The machines beep.
None followed a Max Roach beat.
A nurse gave me water
It tastes of nothing.
This was not my body.
A black scar marks the execution of the old me.
Yet I am alive.
Lazurus the Second.
Bracketed by pain.
But alive with another soul within me.
Paula.
With Old School Lazurus II.
Back from the eternity of white profopol extinction.
No Maine, no South Shore, no New York, no Paris, nor Thailand.
No permanent record.
Tabula Rasa.
Not a trace of the Here-Before.
I am Lazurus II and Paula.
With wicked scars.
Photos reveal the massitude of my transition.
I was never dead before my time.
Only dead to the time before now.
Now under a gray winter sky o’er Brooklyn.
Time eternal, because there is no time in nothingness.
Only Nothing and Lazurus II and Paula.
We are not too lonely together.
Living forever again.
Remember from whence thee came and where we’re going.
Ashes.
Foto by Shannon Greer