3rd Floor Tigers

Cameron thought it was the noise that kept him awake, the sound of mortars firing in the hills above him, or the super sonic crack of a bullet passing close overhead, or the curses and groans and muttered prayers of the casualty collection point. Truth was it was the silence. In the quiet darkness of his room he had all the time in the world to think of all the things he’d done wrong and all the ways he’d failed…
…So he couldn’t sleep.
When he did his nightmares were quiet and cold. He didn’t dream of the chaos of battle, the sounds of rotor blades and explosions, the smell of cordite and blood. He dreamed of cold dark places, the steady beep of a machine, the taste of latex, the cool, comfort of oxygen and the annoyance of plastic tubes stuck in his nose, the taste of saline in the back of his throat. He dreamed of being tied down. He dreamed of needles.

This excerpt feels a little dark to start what is, at it’s core, a funny story but I promised myself I’d pitch my novel more. At the same time I promised a friend to tell a story about The Tiger, and that story is set in the ICU of Walter Reed Army Hospital in October of 2001. It starts with a cold, dark, place and the taste of latex and saline.

Waking from a medically induced coma is a surreal thing. It feels almost like they build the world around you. It's like the "fog of war" in a strategy video game. I could only see what was directly in front of my face. Everything else was a gauzy white. Occasionally I could sense figures moving around. Occasionally a face came into view, some times in focus, other times ghost like and indistinct. One day a group of shadows gathered around me and watched as a black man with a gray beard yanked the foul, choking breathing tube out of my lungs. I gagged and wanted to scream but couldn't make a sound. Then I fell asleep. I remember seeing my mother’s worried face. Then I fell asleep. Each time I woke again the world, my world, expanded ever so slightly outward. There was the bed. Then an IV stand that told me I was in a hospital. Then there were chairs. Then there were walls. A television playing the local news. Charts. Signs. Equipment. Eventually there was a door. Eventually there was a world outside that door, a hallway, a nurses station. Then I fell asleep.

One day, I don't remember when, I woke and found the world complete and in focus. I knew that I’d been in an accident, was severely injured, and was currently in the ICU of Walter Reed Army Hospital (Not Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, much to my disappointment.)

ICU life is mind numbingly dull. You’re unable to move and surrounded by machines. They beep and buzz and whir all day, everyday. There’s needles in your arm and tubes in your chest and bags and bindings and catheters and those stupid fucking compression boots that randomly inflate and deflate with the deafening noise of a discount store air compressor. You can’t move. You can’t do anything for yourself. The only thing there is to entertain you is an eight inch television with a handful of basic cable channels. Your choices are Judge Judy, the local news, staring at the wall, or sleep.

But after a while, sleep comes hard. It’s never warm. It’s never quiet. It’s never really dark. Every two hours someone wakes you, to take a temperature, or check some fluid output, or simply to make sure you’re not dead. Good nurses will at least talk to you. Bad ones just do their thing like a butcher trimming steaks. You awake from the deepest sleep of your life only to find a short time later that you can’t sleep at all. Slowly that white, gauzy, fog starts to roll back in. Slowly things slip out of focus. Slowly the pain fades and the tired seeps in and you start praying for sleep, but as soon as you close your eyes the booties begin to inflate, or the doctors need blood work, or your IV crimps and the fucking pump starts screaming.

And that’s how I found myself somehow laying in bed, fresh out of a week long coma, but sleep deprived.

Then one day they woke me up to add a new medical device, a blue, plastic box, to my IV pole. A single tube came out of the box and connected to the spiderweb of IV tubes and eventually to one of the two needles in my arm. If they told me the medication name I don’t remember. Morphine? Demerol? I don’t know. It was for the pain, they said. They gave me a button that looked like I could use it to buzz into a game show and told me to push it anytime I hurt.

By then pain was a constant. Sometimes sharp and intense, forcing me to grit my teeth. Other times it was a faint sensation, something awful rumbling in the distance, a lurking threat. I don't remember if pressing that button helped the hurt. I don't know that it made anything better. Shit, at that time I'm not sure I could wrap my brain around the concept of "better." What I do know is that button gave me something to do, something I could control, and that meager sense of having some control made me feel at least a little bit better. Or it would have, if I could sleep.

Time seems to ebb and flow differently in the hospital. It’s like swimming in a river and getting caught in an eddy. Time swirled around me constantly but I never seemed to be moving downstream. Everything else floats by and I stayed stuck in the same spot. There was no day. There was no night. I could feel my mind slip just a little from the boredom. Things got foggy. At times it felt like I was slipping back into the coma, back into that gauzy white. I was constantly bored. I was constantly tired. I wanted sleep so badly and yet every time I closed my eyes and started to drift off something would wake me.

So at some point I hatched a plan. Or I think I did. I was on a whole lot of drugs. Tons of drugs. I was sleep deprived and injured and high as fuck so what I’m about to tell you is the reality as I perceived it. I’m not going to tell you it’s the “truth” because I don’t know that it is, but it is my perception of the truth.

I knew, in theory, that pain medication should make me sleep. After all, I’d felt the drugs they'd given me in that tent in Uzbekistan just long enough to realize my fingers were hilarious before they had me count backwards from one hundred and the lights went out. If I could, somehow, take enough pain medication I might be able to knock myself out and maybe sleep through the night. The first problem was, I had no idea what dosage I was being given, or how much it would take to knock me out. I knew that one push of the button barely made the ache fade. I would clearly need a bigger dosage, and that meant figuring out a way to hoard my medication.

I had nothing else to do, so I watched that blue, plastic box for hours, trying to pay attention to every whirr and click and beep it made. I convinced myself that I could tell, based on the sound, when the machine reset. After a while I convinced myself that the I heard the machine reset at the top of every hour. With that information, I moved on to phase two of my plan. For hours I refused to press the button. I sat, without pain medication until the pain was throbbing and hot. I held off until I couldn't take it anymore. Then I pressed the button a half dozen times in rapid succession. I could feel it as the pain subsided and slowly I drifted off to sleep.

Then they woke me up for a urine sample.

Awake again, I watched afternoon TV. I caught the last half of an old Clint Eastwood Spaghetti Western. Then a “Friends” rerun. Then “Jeopardy”. All the while I hoarded my doses. I didn’t take a dose. Didn’t press the button once. I held off even as the pain started to burn through the drug fog and my body began to ache. I watched “Wheel of Fortune”. I watched the evening news. I watched and listened to that pump. I changed the TV to the Discovery channel. I got tired.

At what I thought was eight pm I picked up that button for the first time in hours and pressed it slowly, deliberately. One…Two…Three…I could feel drugs, cool in my veins, then in my head. Six...Seven...Eight. Slowly the pain subsided like a falling tide. The world softened and slipped out of focus. My eyes got heavy, but just when I might’ve slipped off to sleep the night shift came in for their evening rounds. They took blood and urine and a temperature and turned down the lights. I was groggy, but awake, not quite watching the television when they left. I was convinced, by then, that the machine had reset. I picked up the game show buzzer and I pressed it eight more times.

I don’t know if it worked. I don’t know if the machine reset. I don’t know what medication I got or what dosage I managed. I know that as I laid there watching nature documentaries on that tiny TV my eyes began to get unbearably heavy. Slowly at first, but then all of a sudden, I fell blissfully asleep.

It was the sound that woke me. Natural, but somehow unnatural for that environment. Something organic. Something warm. Skittering. Scraping. Tapping on the cold linoleum tile of the hallway. When I opened my eyes it was “dark” in my room but the hallway light spilled in through the open door. From my bed I could see into the hallway, and out to the nurses station where a pair of bored looking women in colorful scrubs sat typing away on aging desktop computers. But there was something else. A shadow. Something stalking. Something moving fast. A sudden flash of movement. Something orange and black and fast moving right to left past my door. More of a blur than a being. More of a sensation of color and movement. Something that felt feral.

I make it sound menacing and worrisome, but I don’t remember being afraid. I recognized the menace and somehow I found myself more fascinated than alarmed. I could sense it. Then I could almost feel it. Then it would run across the doorway, and right behind it, right down the hall I could see the night shift nurses sitting bored at their station, completely oblivious of this…thing.

What. The. Fuck? I don’t know if I said the words aloud but I thought them.

Finally it stopped playing games. Slowly, stealthily, it peeked around the door frame, staring at me from the hallway with big, yellow eyes.

“Holy fucking shit! It’s a tiger!” I said, or thought, in cheerful surprise.

Standing in the hallway, looking at me through the door was one of natures greatest predators, a Siberian tiger, and it was fucking gorgeous. Orange and black and white. Somehow fluffy and sleek. Cute and menacing. I could see it’s whiskers twitch. I could see it’s nostrils flare. I could see it’s chest heave as it breathed. I could see it’s tail curl and uncurl. I could feel it’s eyes on me. I wasn’t the least bit afraid.

How the fuck did you get past the nurses station?

I don't know if I asked the question out loud. The tiger didn't answer. It just stood there in the hallway, watching me with those big yellow eyes. For a minute I marveled at it’s stealth. Somehow, someway, it had broken out of it’s paddock in the National Zoo and made it who knows how far across DC to Silver Springs, past the armed MPs at the gate, into an Army hospital, up several floors and past a manned nurses station without anyone noticing but me. It seemed illogical. Hell it seemed impossible. But there it was, clear as day, an endangered wild tiger standing in the hallway, staring into my hospital room…

Where I was trapped!

The realization came fast. I was fucking trapped. Stuck in a room with one exit. Strapped to a bed. Unable to move or fight. I’m the weakest member of the herd, I realized with growing anxiety.

The tiger seemed to sense my thoughts.

It was a horrific realization, I’m the straggler! Oh shit, oh fuck, I’m the easy meal!

The tiger seemed to smile and for the first time I saw it’s teeth, yellow, hard, and sharp.

And I fucking panicked. I scrambled for the nurses call button. Pressing at it like I was trying to trigger a Claymore mine. I don’t know what I expected them to do. Fight off a tiger? Get eaten themselves? But I had to do something, anything or I was about to become tiger shit.

In the hallway the tiger began to coil like a spring, crouching, preparing to strike, and I could hear it’s claws, those razor sharp, curved, retractable claws. Like switchblades…

I was hallucinating. The realization hit me so hard I could feel it, like a light bulb turning on and then blowing out in my brain. I remember thinking, That can’t be right. I remembered, tiger’s have retractable claws. I realized, I wouldn’t hear the claws on the tile if it was real. (In retrospect, it's odd I never once thought No way the nurses didn't notice this thing get off the elevator.) It was like casting a magic spell. Or maybe like warding off an evil spirit. The tiger disappeared. I swear I heard a faint, cartoony, “poof” sound as it dissolved into orange and black smoke.

For the first time in my life I was truly, legitimately, tripping balls.

I waited a while for the tiger to return but it didn’t. With the "threat" gone I spent some time trying to conjure something else, something more pleasant than a predatory jungle cat, Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders or at least a pretty redheaded nurse I’d seen somewhere. When that didn’t work I tried something smaller, a can of soup, a sandwich. Try as I might I couldn’t force another hallucination. After a while my eyes started getting heavy. The drugs were still working on me. I yawned. I closed my eyes. I fell deeply asleep and I rested. I dunno if I was out for hours or minutes. I just remember them waking me up to take my temperature.

An interesting thing about writing for this blog is I find myself thinking in terms of themes. This is a story I've told for decades, around campfires and beer bottle littered bar room tables and in the front seat of a patrol vehicle backed carefully into a shadowy corner of a night time parking lot. It's always just been a fun story, a tale I love to tell, but somewhere between the writing and the editing I began searching for a theme, a hook to hang the story on. In that searching I stumbled on an idea that's been gnawing at me for a while now.

This story could be bullshit.

If you think about it cynically, you realize it's a little too trite. Like something out of a movie. A young soldier stares down the physical manifestation of his own mortality? It's honestly kinda cheesy, hack shit from a badly written medical drama. There's no evidence, no documentation or witnesses. The only thing I can prove is that I was in Walter Reed and taking massive doses of pain medication in October 2001. Everything else is based on the memory of an injured, drugged, sleep deprived young man under intense stress. I could've made every bit of this up.

Yet I didn't lie to you. I believe this story. I've told it the same way for decades. But it's impossible to prove.

Still I can't help thinking about memory and perception. I can't help thinking about the way we...the way I tell tales and what that means for my own memories. How much of my recollection is truth and how much is myth? How many of my memories are the "based on true events" bullshit movie version of the truth? I don't know. Based on what we know about human memory it is very likely that this entire tale is just a myth I created and then chose to believe. You don't know. Neither do I.

Truth is, I'm not sure I fucking care. It's a good story.

One thing I know for certain is I can't take edibles and read my own stuff anymore.

For Squishy.