1:12pm
The sirens
trumpet a terrifying apocalypse! Their otherworldly music, wild and
discordant, intensifies my panic.
Blood… there’s
a lot of blood. I’m covered in it. How, I wonder, did I not see
this coming? There were hemorrhaging red flags flapping around me all
day long. If only I’d paid closer attention. I shake my head;
dragged to destruction by the links of fate…
The
pain in my stomach is searing. The slightest movement causes a chain
reaction of stabbing tremolos to burn through me. Resigned, I
burrow down, determined to ride it out. Slouching against a
bookshelf, dozens
of copies of Homer’s Odyssey all spattered with blood, stare back
at me.
The black humour
makes me grimace. I suppose I should be grateful that I’m not lying
amongst the manuals in the computer programming section… or in
between rows of engineering texts. Those sections of the library
couldn’t be any less heroic. But here, surrounded by the blind
story-teller’s poetry, the irony isn’t lost.
Anticipating the
coming fury; Homer’s words resound. And like the stalwart Ulysses I
listen to the song that the sirens sing.
In the past I
grimaced whenever a squawking emergency vehicle raced past. The
overbearing scream of horns, the high pitch squeal ricocheting off my
eardrums has always unnerved me. But today, the duet of police and
ambulance sirens is a life-affirming melody to behold. While the rest
of the world, like the shipmates of the wily Greek, plug their ears
against the terrifying wail, the sirens’ song sets my spirit free.
Above restraint
the tides of sorrow burst their banks… Why would someone shoot me?
The necropolis,
normally austere and quiet, now reverberates with shock and awe.
Frightened pleas and involuntary crying float down the stacks,
bleeding panic and confusion. Students are running in all directions.
Some bewildered, in a state of shock, wander out in the open:
mannequins and zombies just waiting to be picked off. Others, hidden
beneath study cubicles have turned on their cell phone cameras and
aim their devices in my direction.
If these are my
final moments, I prefer to look inward, pining for home… for
Ithaca… for Molly.
Lying in a pool
of my own blood I realize something: hope defrauds those it has
promised to save. I know it doesn’t sound all that profound… but
at this moment… Christ, I’m so fucked! I have dreams and a child
on the way. This can’t be happening.
Clearly I’m in
shock. My short-term memory, short-circuited, provides no clue as to
how I ended up like this. The hole in my stomach is large enough to
fit my thumb. Worse, the amount of blood bubbling out doesn’t bode
well for my future.
Taking a deep
breath I try to make sense of my predicament. What’s the last thing
I remember? Shackled to my fate, I rack my brain but can’t free my
short-term memory. What the fuck happened to me?
I
begin to rewind, going further back in time to the start of my day.
And in a flash I find myself back in that moment when dream
and consciousness played tricks with me. I remember feeling fractured
apart: locked in a tug-of-war between dimensions. Compelled I lost
myself in the illusions that Hypnos conjured up for me.
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