No one had come for me yet. I was disappointed, disturbed and discouraged, all at the same time. While I was complaining to a nurse about the chill in my toes, my limbs started to shake uncontrollably; she triggered a Code Blue to alert the trauma staff. I found myself at the centre of a frenzy of activity.
I had been awake in that moment before I went into cardiac arrest, before my heart threatened to flat line. My vital organs had been shutting down one by one. My body was reacting violently to this.
“Hold his legs and arms,” I heard voices yelling. “All right; now turn him over.”
I felt hands on my ankles and thighs. I felt hands on my shoulders. All trying to keep my body from convulsing madly.
The tubes and needles were annoying me, so I yanked them off. I flicked away the oximetre sensor on the tip of my finger. Immediately afterward, I felt the bed quake underneath me.
“What in the world is going on?” someone asked charily.
“Some kind of a tremor,” someone else replied.
I wanted to tell them that wasn’t it. I knew better. It was something else, something more sinister and out of this world. Something evil. It was Abaddon, and he had returned for me just as I was beginning to forget he existed. I was fearful again, squirming at the thought that Abaddon was close by lurking in the dark corners. I didn’t want to be here or wait to find out if my hunch was correct.
However, a thought was brought to bear on me that if this was Abaddon’s work, then he couldn’t have been the one that had set me free, allowing me to be brought here for treatment. Why set me free to torture me here? Why not do it in his lair? Was it to make good his promise to torment me forever no matter where I was? He would always find me and I could never hide from him.
All this to inform me that he didn’t respond kindly to rejection.
Someone had administered a shot to control my fits.
The bed stopped shaking.
Tubes were restored to my cavities. Clips bit the ends of my fingers.
Padded ankle and wrist straps kept me immobilized and humiliated. Was this necessary?
“Sorry about the restraints, buddy,” someone apologised as if in reply, “but we can’t risk letting you yank off these tubes again. Gotta keep you alive so we can sort out your problem.”
Nice touch – accessories to match the drab hospital gown.
I quickly gestured to the orderly (I surmised he was an orderly) before he could leave. He leaned toward my mouth to hear me more clearly.
“Can you get me some socks, please?” I requested in barely a whisper. “My toes are chilly. And can you make sure the socks are clean?”
He felt my feet: “Your feet do feel rather chilly. I’ll see what I can do.”
I smiled gratefully. I waited patiently for my socks but an hour would go by before it dawned on me that the orderly wasn’t going to keep his promise. Not long after, I felt a sinking sensation overcome me: I was slipping into a coma.
“Stay with me, Little One,” someone whispered in the dark, in my ear. “You’re going home soon.”
With some effort, I heard the familiar voice once more utter over my head: “Affirmative. I’ve found him. I have the fledgling; we’re in New Canaan – at the Mount Shinar University Hospital, ICU Ward 17.”
“Who’s there?” I whimpered in my semi-somnolent state. “Remy, is that you?”
The voice appeared to belong to someone standing behind me. I rolled my head this way and that to try to get a glimpse of him. With eyes at half staff, I caught sight of the angel, Remiel. There was no mistaking Remy: he of the burnished bronze hair and aubergine eyes. It vivified my senses to see one of the elders of the heavenly hosts.
I began to search all over the room with my eyes. The only thing I saw, aside from the stifling darkness, was the solitary night light at the doorway. Sadness came over me as I began to wonder if Remiel had been a mere trick of the mind. I was, after all, delirious and in a drug induced stupor.
I was about to give up finding Remiel when I heard the surreptitious movement of feet on the floor.
“Remy,” I whispered once more.
However, it wasn’t Remiel’s face I was to see hovering over me. It was Gabriel’s.
“Hey,” Gabriel whispered, caressing my forehead. “Not Remiel, though it was Remiel who first found you. He immediately contacted us. But are these necessary?”
Gabriel was referring to my bonds, and echoing my thoughts exactly.
“Y’know me, hospibals and I, like oil ‘n waber,” I jested. “Tubes; staff didn’ like kep pulling ‘m off, dey said.”
I was having a lot of difficulty articulating my words with the tube in my throat. I was unable to enunciate accurately any of my vowels. Several of my consonants were trapped inside my throat. And most of my ‘t’s came out sounding like ‘b’s.
Then, I was all at once gasping for breath.
“Shh, shh,” Gabriel hushed, “don’t talk anymore.”
I next heard the understated fluttering of angelic wings which had been preceded by a temperate breeze in the room. Someone else had entered my ward. I couldn’t tell who it was for his head was out of my line of sight.
Gabriel promptly left my bedside. I overheard muffled conversation.
“He’s in a bad way.”
“I had anticipated that. Now, please, step aside, Gabriel.”
Michael? I thought.
“Patience, Michael. You should prepare yourself for what you’re about to see.”
 |
| I next heard the understated fluttering of angelic wings. |
“I assure you, Gabriel, there’s nothing I haven’t seen: I’ve seen arms and legs of men, women and children blown off their bodies in wars and suicide bombings. I’ve seen humans disembowelling themselves in hara-kiri and setting themselves on fire in voluntary immolation. I’ve seen the limbs and heads of unwanted babies torn piecemeal in abortions.”
“Yes, Mika, but it’s your son that’s lying in the ICU.”
“And he’s alive. My son’s doing better than the children of wrath.”
Dad? I thought again.
“Nevertheless, you need to be prepared: he has serious injuries . . . there are lacerations and ligatures, all over his body. His face looks like it’s been sliced open from ear to ear; his skin’s torn in various places.”
“All right, Gabriel. Thank you. If you don’t mind, I’d like to see my son now.”
Before long, Michael was bending over me.
“Dad,” I whispered through the tube in my throat.
“I’m here now, dear heart,” the Archangel replied. His eyes filled up. He briefly closed them to staunch himself. Opening them again, he gave me a tender smile while he caressed my forehead: “Try not to talk.”
He headed for the end of my bed. He clasped my feet in his hands to put warmth in my toes, rubbing them.
“I asked them for socks,” I mumbled to him while my ankles and wrists were being released from their bondage.
“They didn’t come back with my socks,” I added.
The elders returned to me. “No socks,” Michael repeated sympathetically, stroking my forehead.
Then, Gabriel gently gathered me into his arms. He rolled me over. “You won’t need socks,” he stated. “We’re here now. Let us take care of you.”
“Just as we had suspected,” Michael maintained, with no hint of surprise. He was behind me, examining my back and shoulders. “They’ve been removed.”
“Is it bad?” I asked.
“Hush,” the Archangel whispered, stroking the back of my head. At the same time, he delivered his evaluation to Headquarters, imparting it telepathically: It doesn’t look encouraging. His wings have been severed. We’re coming in right now. Kindly notify the angel, Asahel, at the Medical Centre.
“You’re going to make it,” promised Gabriel who was entreating me to lie on my back.
Michael proceeded to roll down my gown. He easily found the mark on my chest, for no one at the hospital had known how to make it go away, and placed his hand on it. His other arm crossed over my shoulders, slightly lifting my head up.
My head jerked forward while I felt something leave me. I looked down on my chest. The mark was fading. I was passed back to Gabriel who swiftly set about the task of removing every tube and needle that was sticking inside me.
Something that had been keeping me alive, now removed, was impacting me in a dire way. I fell into a fever and felt very, very sick.
Michael heard my feeble whimper. “Hang in there,” he told me.
Having cleared me of every invasive tube and needle, the Archangel Gabriel raised me up and delivered me back to Michael’s bosom. I felt like fainting. My feet barely touched the floor but that was also because my human height came up two feet short of my elders’ height. They were passing me back and forth as if I were an unpinned grenade. Although I felt feeble, I put force in my stomach to resist vomiting. I stayed my knee muscles from atrophying. As if to help me along, Michael wrapped his arms firmly around me.
“I got you,” he promised, hugging me. He drew me close to his chest while I sank my head on his shoulder.
“You heard me?” I found the strength to ask. This didn’t seem the right time to ask, but I needed to know.
“I heard you,” the elder replied.
I barely made out Gabriel crudely wrapping the bed sheet around me and under Michael’s wings, cocooning me in Michael’s embrace.
“We sent out search and rescue teams the first time I heard your distress call,” Michael went on to clarify in a soft voice. “All the teams were deployed: Gabriel’s, Uriel’s, Remiel’s and Raphael’s. Everyone was alerted to keep an eye out for you but you were completely under our radar after your first distress signal. The mark that was burned into your chest? That’s Abaddon’s hallmark. It makes you invisible to us: whatever telepathic connection between us is, thence, compromised by it. In fact, everything that’s happened to you has the mark of Abaddon’s M.O.”
“But I heard the thoughts you just imparted to Headquarters,” I continued, my diction improving all the time.
“Distance can make a difference,” Michael explained succinctly, tightening his arms around me.
“And Abaddon – he’s a demon?” I asked.
“He’s more accurately an angel – one of the Fallen Ones,” Gabriel replied, while I watched him tie together the two ends of the sheet to secure it.
“It’s true, then,” I asked further, “Abaddon’s the Angel of Death, Apollyon?”
Gabriel nodded: “Aye, beloved. They’re one and the same. Abaddon is Lucifer’s chief emissary, as well as a loyal ally of Lucifer’s seed, the Antichrist.”
Then, turning to Michael, he stated, “We’re all set.”
“This won’t be a rough passage,” Michael vowed, dispatching us out of the window. In mere seconds, we were above the earth’s atmosphere.
The wind roared past me, pounding my face as it did. I was human now; I was subject to all the unpleasant vicissitudes of the atmosphere. Gabriel, flying alongside, shielded my face with one of his massive wings.
It didn’t take Michael long to conduct us to Control Headquarters in Tel Aviv. This was the IDFs’ central base outside the angels’ garrison in Petra. A gurney was on standby near a helicopter.
The bed sheet round me was being untied. Over the Archangel’s shoulder, I caught sight of Ariel. Ariel was a half-angel and my kin. He was my own flesh and blood; but I hadn’t expected to catch Ariel here.
“Ariel,” I whispered just as his head was disappearing in a sea of angelic beings surrounding him.
Several of our Tel Aviv comrades had enclosed themselves round him, their hands pressed firmly against his chest. A plethora of gratuitous pushing and shoving around prevented him from approaching me. The look on his youthful face was hard.
“Why are you keeping us apart?” he was asking the angel, Haziel. “I just want to see for myself that he’s all right.”
Haziel’s here in Tel Aviv, too? I asked myself. Are they all here to see me? Perhaps the brethren had cared after all.
I tried to work out why Haziel felt it necessary to stop my own sibling from seeing me. I wanted to be reunited with him, too. I told them so. Then, it dawned on me that my condition could be critical, that perhaps I was closer to death than I had supposed. Ariel might not be aware of this and they were doing him a favour.
I didn’t revile against dying so much as causing Ariel anguish. “I’m sorry, Ari,” I apologised to him.
Loosened from the bed sheet, I was disengaged from Michael’s arms. I was laid on a stretcher. An oxygen mask set over my mouth assisted with my respiration and an intravenous drip fixed to my hand kept me hydrated. Then, I heard someone deliver a pronouncement. Following the pronouncement, I was carefully lifted up with the stretcher and carried toward the helicopter; all the while Ariel’s voice grew fainter behind me.
Above me, the sky was reflecting the sobering blood-red glow of the moon. Two shooting stars streaked from opposite ends of the sky, arresting the attention of everyone on the ground. The stars metamorphosed. Before long, the angels, Uriel and Remiel, were diving down on us; they shape shifted in the air, assuming their respective identities as Uri Stahl and Remy Jochanan, both soldiers in the Israeli Defense Forces.
Michael greeted the two Commanders with a friendly embrace. Since our arrival in Tel Aviv, Michael and Gabriel had also assumed their human forms, as General Micah ben Israel and Commanding General Gavriel Benelisha respectively. In their human appearances, all four Commandos were cookie cutter emblems of the generic soldier: military-style close-cropped hair, muscular physiques camouflaged by loosely-worn army fatigues, their six and a half feet stature atop pristinely buffed army boots.
The three strapping soldiers traded words with one another while walking closely beside me. Uriel and Remiel, I heard, were making a purposeful stopover from their missions to impart to me their blessings and send me off. As soon as we were side by side with the helicopter, I was transferred to the gurney. While I was being belted up, the tripartite strongmen of our company leaned forward to have a few words with me.
“Have a quick recovery, beloved,” Remiel stated. “The Lord be with you.”
I gave Remy a weak smile.
Uri crouched down next to me: “I feel some responsibility for everything that’s happened. I should have seen you home; perhaps even stayed awhile to be sure you had not been followed, till you were safe. I’m sorry.”
I shook my head; I wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault but he had taken my hand. He bent slightly to kiss my forehead. “Godspeed, Dear One. We’ll see you soon.”
I nodded. Then, I was taken on board the helicopter. The craft was for the moment immobile, being refuelled for my airlift to the Petra Medical Centre, more or less ten kilometres away from the Command Headquarters where the Lord’s angels were based.
It was hardly the destination of choice – the Medical Centre. I didn’t want to be saved; that hadn’t changed. My mortal coil was opposed to a lifetime of torment by Abaddon and his demons.
With my gurney harnessed to a rig, Michael knelt down on one leg beside me. He got busy, rearranging my bedding to make me feel as comfortable on the gurney as possible. It wasn’t necessary; the flight to the hospital was going to be a short one.
I caught my handler’s eye. He had beautiful smiling eyes, eyes like the glorious azure of the celestial skies. Depending on which side you were on, they were eyes that could either disarm you or instil confidence in you.
“I don’t need to be hospitalized,” I removed the mask and said to him confidently.
He let out a big sigh.
“Really, Mishael,” he replied blithely, fussing with the scratchy blanket around my neck and tucking the slacks under my sides, “when have you ever felt you needed to be hospitalized?”
My brows furrowed. Just like that he had killed the thread. It irritated me whenever one of the elders would treat me as if I were invisible. I wiggled irritably against the rigid constrictions. Michael had tucked me up too tightly. Probably to ensure I wasn’t going to do a runner.
I gazed out of the open door. I searched the vicinity of the hangar for my brother. He was long gone, taken away. I was not to see Ariel again for many more days.
Gabriel, in dark aviator glasses, emerged from the supplies station and climbed on board. The door of the helicopter closed. Outside the window, I watched another helicopter circling low over a revetment.
“Who’s in the Apache with the angel, Jekuthiel?” I asked out of curiosity.
“The angel, Raphael,” Gabriel replied. “He has recently successfully commandeered a remnant of the Lord’s elect from a POW camp in Addis Ababa. Several of the evacuees are being taken to the Medical Centre for observation. It’s going to be a busy day for Asahel and his team.”
Finding my arm, Gabriel administered a painkiller intravenously. The painkiller was Raphael’s so-called nostrum, he explained, placing the oxygen mask back over my mouth. After that, he turned to Michael: “She’s all fuelled up. We can take off now.”
I removed the mask again. I caught Michael’s hand.
“I don’t want to be left with the Medics,” I pleaded seriously with my elders. “You remember what happened the last time I was at the Medical Centre. They nearly threw me out of my brother’s ward. When I tried to resist them, they knocked me out with a sedative! On top of that indignity, they had threatened to give me a CAT-scan because they thought there might be something wrong with my brain.”
“Ariel was in an induced coma, fledgling,” Gabriel reminded me. “No one was allowed in his oxygen tent. You were compromising Ariel’s well-being when you attempted to interfere with his treatment.”
“I was worried about him,” I explained. “I wasn’t trying to interfere. I thought he was going to succumb to his gunshot wounds. My brother had been shot in the head and I wanted to be there for him. The Medics simply have no inkling about human emotions.”
“This is where you’re perverting the truth about the Lord’s angels,” Michael chided me. “On the contrary, all the holy angels understand what it is like to love and grieve for a brother. I’m holding out for the day when the Lord reveals us to the human race and, then, mankind’s defective views about angels shall be disabused.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I’ve been careless with my words. Just the same, please do not leave me alone with the staff there. I’d be mortified to look them in the eye. I have a history of making myself their bête noire.”
“They’re the Lord’s angels, Mish,” Gabriel stated tenderly, “and holy angels do not maintain long accounts of ancient grievances. They have no cause to bring to mind what you’ve done in the past. It’s time you got past it as well.”
The oxygen mask was put over my mouth for the last time. After that, the elders retreated to the cockpit.
I heard a static over the transmitter before an inaudible message crackled through it. Footsteps rapidly receded from the landing strip. Gabriel gave a signal and Jekuthiel’s aircraft rose into the air. In a flurry of twirling blades, our helicopter made her ascent, following Jekuthiel at a close distance.
A black cloud was hanging over me. After a long absence, I was finally reunited with the two individuals I loved more than any other created being. I ought to be relishing this day. Instead, I was sinking ever further into despair. I didn’t know what had come over me, but I couldn’t tell Michael. Michael didn’t appear in any mood to engage in inane conversation.
I closed my eyes. Perhaps when I next opened them, things might seem less gloomy.
There was a slight bump and we grounded outside the Petra Medical Centre. I opened my eyes. I looked out of the hatch at the sanitary walls of the Medical Centre. The hospital felt as welcoming as a cheeseburger to a vegan model.
The doors of the Medical Centre sprang open. Orderlies hurried toward the helicopter to roll me into the hospital. I didn’t have the chance to say anything to either Michael or Gabriel. Nor they me.
The orderlies were, then, hastening me toward Radiology. I counted the time it took the elevator doors to open to us. About four seconds. I tried to count the number of ceiling lamps in the floor I was taken to, but lost count at twenty-five.
Not much later, I was inside an MRI machine. Time stood still: my senses were tripping at the rotating noise produced by the magnetic field gradients in the scanner. That and the dreary light in the machine were numbing me, causing me to feel drowsy. The light dulled further until there was only darkness.
I had been asleep when I was rolled into an ICU ward.
A rash of images streaked out of the darkness of the ward.
Who’s there? I asked drowsily.
Crimson eyes blazed at me.
Mi-sha-el. Here, Mishael. Look over here.
Hideous voices crowed while razor-sharp bicuspids grated at me.
I hollered at them: Who are you?
Don’t you remember? They said. It’s Abaddon. I told you I would come back for you, didn’t I?
I screamed: “No. No, no, no, no, no. Stay away from me.”
It’s time, Mishael. You belong to me.
“Stay away from me, I said,” I screamed again. I rolled off the gurney at the same time, upsetting the intravenous drip all over my gown.
“Hey, now, what’s going on there?” someone asked.
My hand reached for the leg of the gurney. I grasped it tightly before leveraging it to winch myself off the floor.
Two angels in white robes, who had been occupied at a corner of the ward, were glaring numb struck at me. They had been alerted to my tumble. I ignored the ache in my knees that was sustained from the tumble and careered the short distance to their wake. I fell into the arms of the taller angel.
“De . . . demons,” I stammered nonsensically to him. “Demons.”
“He’s incoherent,” he suggested to his colleague beside him.
“I’ll look for Michael,” his colleague offered.
Michael was crouching next to me within moments. And behind him, Asahel with his team. They must have recently completed evaluating my MRI scans.
I shook my head at Michael. “Take me away from here,” I stuttered. “Please. He’s come for me. I don’t want to be here.”
“Who, Mish?” Michael asked. “Who has come for you?”
My attention was sidetracked by Gabriel who was entering the ward. He squatted down beside Michael. I glared at him, at all of them.
“He mentioned something about demons earlier,” the orderly informed Michael.
“All right,” the Archangel said. “Notify the angel, Abishael, would you, please, Gabriel? I want eyes on the sky and every possible niche scoured for enemy invaders.”
Gabriel retreated, nodding.
My handler turned to the Chief of Staff. “Let me have some time with Mishael, please,” he requested while he carefully collected me from my orderly’s arms. He held me against his bosom, saying into my ear: “Don’t be anxious, Little One. If there are demons, they’re not going to trouble you here.”
I whimpered with pain. My painkiller had worn off its effects to narrow the gap between numbness and sensation. For the first time since leaving the public hospital, I became aware again of the agonizing pangs that were tormenting every part of my body. My body felt as if it was rolling in an avalanche that wouldn’t end. The pain all over the surface of my skin was a different one altogether. The pain of being chewed on by a pride of starving lions. A constant pain more annoying than a persistently itchy scab.
With vision hampered by swelling eyelids reluctant to rise above quarter mast, I glanced down at my bare arms and thighs. Blotchy red and purple patchwork patterns were marking my skin where it was lacerated. Some of the open wounds had also become purulent: they were weeping again with a bit of pus mingled with the translucent red of haemoglobin. Observing my own nasty injuries, I thought: what a mess.
“What a mess,” one of the nurses at the Mount Shinar University Hospital had said. Then, when she failed to clean up my wounds completely, she asked rhetorically: “Who could do this monstrous thing to another human being? What exactly did they do to you, eh? Honey, it’s made apparent to several of the staff here that you’re among the rare breed of modern-day eunuchs. Did your employer do this to you? Was he the one that abused you? ‘Coz I’ve never seen anything like it.”
And, then, there was my head. I felt as if I was balancing a gigantic boulder on my shoulders. “What’s wrong with my head?” I mumbled unintelligibly.
The yearning to cry in front of Michael checked at the hospital lobby, I clamped my teeth on his shoulder. My teeth bit into his flesh through his cloak while my mind winced at every bit of the pain nagging at me. To take my mind off my pain, I tried concentrating instead on my handler’s heartbeats throbbing placidly but distinctly against me. I knew their rhythm and sensation so well. My self-prescribed diversion was paying dividend: I felt pacified, my subconsciousness convincing me that the stings in my body were slowly waning. My attention was, then, turned toward Michael’s nice smelling neck. So piquant were my six senses, aided by my part-angelic nature, that my olfactory device could not avoid being acutely alert to the novel scent on his preternatural skin. It wasn’t just Michael, however; the heavenly nonpareils all had fresh-smelling skin for perspiring was alien to their experiences.
I heard Michael’s low-decibel grunts, informing me that my mandible that was grinding against his flesh was causing him some discomfort of his own. He carefully lifted my head from his shoulder. He eased me onto his lap. My fists habitually pressed themselves against my eyes, successfully plugging the cracks that were starting to appear on my floodgate and destabilize it. I had also successfully prevented displaying to Michael a moment of appalling weakness. Or so I thought.
Michael lightly coiled his fingers on my right wrist. “I thought we had an understanding,” he reminded me. “You don’t have to hide anything from me.”
Words failed me.
“What’s the matter, son?” he asked, this time assuming a paternal tone. “What’s going on with you? I’ve never seen you this distressed.”
I shook my head: “I don’t want to be here. I keep trying to tell you.”
It was all I could manage.
The curtains swayed, catching my watchful eye. “Hey, you,” someone cried out from the window.
My heart leapt wildly. I peered at the menacing movements behind the window curtains. And, then, I saw him.
Abaddon, I thought.
His red bug eyes were glowing. His mouth, devoid of lips, was moulded into a deranged smile. I began to squirm on Michael’s lap.
I was squirming fairly spiritedly when I next heard the demon demand for my soul.
It’s time, he said, speaking in a bloodcurdling tone.
I shook my head maniacally and squeezed my eyes against this sinister invader from another world.
“Your injuries are severe, fledgling,” Michael began, clasping my wrists before holding down my arms crossed over my chest. “We’re here so that you can be made whole again. I want you to be as brave as you’ve always been. I’m going to be right beside you all the way. You won’t be alone.”
“Didn’t you see him?” I asked nervously. “Didn’t you hear him?”
“See whom?” he asked. “Hear what?”
I peeked at the velvet curtains again. They appeared now completely unperturbed. Had Abaddon really been here? Or was what I had seen and heard a few seconds ago simply a figment of my imagination stemming from a persecution complex?
Feeling defeated and fearing that I might be losing my mind, I turned my attention from the window. I buried my face in Michael’s torso. “You don’t understand,” I insisted irritably, just short of launching into a paroxysm of my muddled emotions.
“All right, Mishael,” my handler persuaded in a soft voice, “that’s quite enough. You’re not making any sense to me. You’re going to stay here however long it takes to put you on the mend. I give you my word: I’m not leaving you to go through this on your own.”
Asahel’s team of Medics, comprising heaven’s angels and human saints, returned to pick me up before putting me back on the gurney. Not long after, I felt a prick in my arm. I started to go under.
“I don’t need to be here,” I murmured, feeling groggy but still in some control of my faculties. Seconds later, I felt some euphoria from the anaesthesia, which emboldened me. I groaned boldly: “How do I make you understand, Michael? I don’t want to be saved. I want to die. I’d rather die than live in fear. There’s much blood on my hands, blood I’m responsible for spilling. I deserve to die. It’s right that I should pay for my crimes. Do you understand, Mika? Am I making sense to you now?”
“He’s just delirious from the anaesthetic,” someone assured Michael on top of my pleas. “There’s no cause for alarm.”
“No,” I cried, protesting against the anaesthesiologist’s interruption.
Michael hunched over to caress my forehead. He appeared conflicted about the state of my mental condition but he seemed, finally, to be registering every word I was saying to him. Why shouldn’t he? He was, after all, my teacher, my surrogate father of choice, and he had known me for much longer than the anaesthesiologist.
“I hear you and I understand you completely. We will talk about it, but later,” he promised me, in a displeased tone, before discharging me to the care of the hospital staff.
I threw my palms over my eyes.
Yes, later, I thought to myself. Later, he would hammer out his portable lessons in the meaning of life on the anvil of my fear.
I was transferred to a metal bed. A brace, part of the bed, was stretched across my chin. A metal strap, also part of the bed, was secured over my groin and another across my ankles.
While I marinated in the general anaesthetic, I was made to endure the rigmarole of being inserted with a variety of hospital implements once more. Needles, long ones as well as portly ones, were jammed into the veins of my hands and feet. Tubes snaking from several must-have ER machines were rammed through my nose and mouth. My cheeks were wiped before something soft was placed over my eyelids. Afterward a metal band completely covered my eyes.
With no prior warning, I felt a tube inserted into my head through an incision made in my scalp. My fingers clawed at the sheets. Despite feeling sedated, I was conscious of the pain from the incision. The pain was worse than the trauma that was concurrently beleaguering my bone marrow, and that was excruciating.
Michael felt he needed, at this time, to assuage my pain for he had taken my hand. I felt a gentle squeeze. Shh, he whispered.
I responded to his gentle soothing. And succumbed, at last, to the anaesthetic. I listened to the soft hum of the machines turned on. I felt liquid coursing up the infusion pump. Except for the prick of the needles I could, otherwise, feel no other discomfort or pain. Save the pain of knowing that all this was a waste of everybody’s time.
I don’t want to be saved, I informed Michael telepathically, once more, before being given another sedative. It’s pointless. If I chose to end my life, not even you would be able to stop me.
In a few seconds, silence enfolded me. I felt myself sinking into the restful silence and, then, I fell into a deep sleep.
“How long has he been under?” someone asked sometime during my waking moment. I, then, heard muted voices engaged in conversation. I recognized one of the voices.
Gabriel was deferring to Michael at the door. “I’ll keep an eye on things while you’re out,” he offered.
“Gabriel,” I cried.
“I’m right beside you, Little One,” Gabriel replied. “Are you comfortable?”
I nodded.
“Did you find them?” I asked him, reminded of the demons in my last sleep.
“Find whom?” Gabriel asked in a tender voice.
“The demons,” I clarified. “Did Abishael locate Abaddon’s demons?”
“No, brave heart,” he replied. “Not in the last few hours. You’re safe here.”
I shook my head: I wasn’t safe. Gabriel was mistaken. All of them were mistaken.
“Is Mika coming back?” I asked. My palm reached for the band over my eyes. “I dislike not being able to see what’s going on.”
Gabriel took my offending hand in his: “Of course, he’s coming back. He’s right outside, in the hall, having a word with your brother, Ariel. He won’t be long. Try to get some sleep now, all right?”
“Is Ariel not permitted to visit with me?” I pursued.
“You’re not allowed any other visitor except Mika and me,” he replied.
“Why? Am I in such a bad shape?” I pursued some more.
“You’re going to mend, Little One,” my elder assured me. “And Mika’s trying to minimize the anguish for everyone, that’s all.”
“I think I made him angry,” I confessed.
“Be at peace, Little One; Mika’s not easily angered,” Gabriel assured me again.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. “Tell him I’m very sorry.”
Gabriel’s turn to whisper: “I’m sure he knows that already. Now go back to sleep.”
I did as told.
