NOT VAHALLA

 

Choosing to risk his own life rather than order one of his Spartans to almost certainly lose their hands, if not their own life,

Richard Blaine fires a prototype Laser Cannon from the future to save his men and the wounded soldiers from Operation Tiger.

As the ghost of Mark Twain could have told him: no good deed goes unpunished. Blaine collapses from the pain.

NOT VAHALLA

“No one is so brave that he is not disturbed by something unexpected.”

– Julius Caesar

 

That I woke up not dead was the first surprise.

The second surprise followed close on the heels of the first: I was blind.

A heartbeat stab of cold panic. Then, I felt the heavy, strange fabric covering my eyes.

I heaved a sigh of relief. If my eyes were covered, it hinted that there was a chance I would be able to see again.

My eyes were covered for a reason.

I reflected on the purity of all human motivations, and the panic was back.

Eyesight is not just about seeing.

It's about truly experiencing the world around us.

Our eyesight is a gift that allows us to see the beauty and wonder of life, to navigate around the bumps and potholes of life.

To have good eyesight is to have a window into the soul of the world, into the souls of those around us revealed in their eyes.

The truth of eyes lies not only in their color and shape, but also in the stories they tell or don’t tell.

Without my sight, I was naked against the night, against those who dwelled in the night of the soul whether it was day or dark.

That thought led to the third surprise: I was naked.

It’s said clothes make the man. I suppose so. As Mark Twain wrote: Naked men have little to no influence on society.

In a strange way clothes are on us to expose us -- to advertise why we wear them to conceal. Take a raven tying peacock feathers to his wings.

That would tell you much about that particular raven.

We put clothes on to propagate the lies of our lives and back them up.

The lack of clothes led me to the fourth surprise: I was floating.

Like Dorothy before me, I realized I was no longer in Kansas. In the America of the 1940’s, floating patients was reserved for Magic Acts.

Cold air currents flowed over me making my body one big goose bump.

Cold?

Well, that ruled out Hell … unless I was on the lowest level. But then, what had Dante known?

And the smell of those air currents was all off. It smelled stale but neutral. No stench of burnt flesh from my charred palms.

 I was getting creeped out by all these surprises.

Nothing is more memorable than a smell. One scent can be unexpected, momentary and fleeting, yet conjure up a childhood summer beside a lake in the mountains.

Sometimes life takes you on unexpected paths. But this was ridiculous. I understood that those paths aren't always in the same direction.

Still, I hate it when life decides to tug me in opposing directions to see if it can break me.

The fifth surprise was that I couldn’t feet my hands, but my wrists hurt like hell.

Was I in Hell?

If so, then the custodians had taken my clothes. Out of meanness, out of a lousy sense of humor?

Enough was enough.

Apparently, not. My nose started to itch. I tried to scratch it with my right throbbing wrist.

I couldn’t move.

Now, I was beginning to panic.

At St. Marok’s I had seen new arrivals at the orphanage panic. It always ended badly for them.

Panic implies that there is no rational solution to the pressing problem.

But with a working mind … and my mind was one of the few things I had that was still working … you could always find some remedy to the situation.

Not a perfect remedy, mind you, but then this is an imperfect world.

You worked with what you had.

I had a mind, so I would use that.

A single event can awaken within us a stranger totally unknown to us. To live is to be slowly born. I certainly felt as ignorant and helpless as a new-born.

So, what did a new-born baby do when it was scared?

It cried.

‘All right, Sentient. Where am I? Where are you?’

No answer. Long, long minutes of no answer.

All right. Maybe now was the time to panic.

A little.