Everything's Eventual

Autopsy Room Four

It's so dark that for awhile - just how long I don't know- I think I'm still unconscious. Then, slowly, it comes to me that unconscious people don't have a sensation of movement through the dark, accompanied by a faint, rhythmic sound that can only be a squeaky wheel. And I can feel contact, from the top of my head to the balls of my heels. I can smell something that might be rubber or vinyl. This is not unconsciousness, and there is something too...too what? Too rational about these sensations for it to be a dream.
Then what is it?
Who am I?
And what's happening to me?
The squeaky wheel quits it's stupid rhythm and I stop moving. There is a crackle around me from the rubber- smelling stuff.
A voice: 'Which one did they say?'
A pause.
Second voice: 'Four, I think. Yeah, four'
We start to move again, but more slowly. I can hear the faint scuff of feet now, probably soft- soled shoes, maybe sneakers. The owners of the voices are the owners of the shoes. They stop me again. There's a thump followed by a faint whoosh. It is, I think, the sound of a door with a pneumatic hinge being opened.
What's going on here? I yell, but the yell is only in my head. My lips don't move. I can fell then- and my tongue, lying on the floor of my mouth like a stunned mole- but I can't move them.
The thing I'm on starts rolling again. A moving bed? Yes. A gurney, in other words. I've had some experience with them, a long time ago, in Lyndon Johnson's shitty little asian adventure. It comes to me that I'm in hospital, that something bad has happened to me, something like the explosion that almost neutered me twenty-three years before, and that I'm going to be operated on. There are a lot of answers in that idea, sensible ones, for the most part, but I don't hurt anywhere. Except for the minor matter of being scared out of my wits, I feel fine. And if these are orderlies wheeling me into an operating room, why can't I see? Why can't I talk?
To be continued...