Nobody knows. Still. After all this time.

I was a young blade at the time. A tenor in a chorale in town for one performance only.

Lying on cold stainless steel, a gurney. On my back, body naked, shaved, covered with a thin gown. An ensemble of tubes being jammed up my nose, shoved up my dick, piped into my throat; more of them surgically puncturing my neck, my side, my lungs. For drainage.

Under a hard florescence but I’ve lost vision. I joke about counting backwards from a hundred to 96 then…

Coming around slowly, slowly, but not truly conscious. Far from it. My tongue, worrying the tangle of plastic in my mouth, dislodges something in my throat and suddenly I can’t breathe, or call out, vocal passages blocked. Or use my arms, arms, which—I now discover—are lashed to the gurney rails. Semi-conscious, primordial panic. I hear the alto of a nurse talking, far far off. Only one possible way to signal her: flailing my legs.

How could I have done that, I think later, with seventy-two stitches up and down my abdomen?

But the far far off nurse hears and takes notice. The slow muted ostinato of her padded footwear as she meanders over. Remedies the blockage.

So I’ll live. And so fall unconscious again. Much later I wonder, was this dying and being reborn? And also wonder: Is it buried in our memory, the moment of our birth? When mortality gets slapped into us?

Lying, warm, in a censer smoke-like reverie, aglow with IV Demerol. Murmurs of talking, interspersed with song bursts of recognizable language: “… surprised he made it… ” And “… massive blood loss… ” My eyes open. A chorale of white jackets surrounding the bed. A surgeon, holding forth, conducting a circle of assistants and interns. How he saved my life. Who I would not know if he stood in front of me today. Explaining the particulars: massive bleeding, liters lost, dimensions, width and breadth of the knife where it penetrated the organs. The nodding interns, studious and taking notes. One forms a smile, seeing my own. On seeing the plumage of well-wisher’s flowers all around me.

The next time my eyes open, just one man, soloing, in a chair pulled next to the window next to my bed, not in whites, a crinkled poplin suit. Smoking. Seeing I had come to again, he asks me, can I answer some questions. I pass out on him. My detective.

Slumber here is easy. Melodic white noise. rise and fall, the polyphonic din of the many many other patients, in long rows either side, and across, from me. Beds and beds of them. Operatic moaning. Cantatas of cries. Like a pediatrics wing, only not. A trauma ward is what it is.

The detective is patient. He’ll come back, ask his questions another time. Next time he does, I do my best to answer them, sedated as I am. Difficult to remember details. It’s an effort and I drift off and when I come to again, it’s late late at night and my bouquets of well-wisher flowers are cowled in darkness and the detective is gone.

Each time I revive, I see new victims. They come particularly night. They’re rough and troubled, all men, all from the street. I’m alien. I’m like a guest; they’re like a captive audience.

“Gentle! You mmmothrrr.… fffuckin scumbags!”

Yelling brings me to again. A gurney rolling up across from me. Burly orderlies unload its patient him onto the bed opposite. I can’t see much of him; he is bandaged thoroughly and only partly visible. They strap him, like they had me, to the bed. Only his head is free, writhing and seething like a separate demon. His mouth grotesque, his voice shrill. He continues spewing profanities; a dissonant blizzard of slurred, shrieking invective as they struggle to change his badly bloodied dressings, wheel up IV stands, pierce his neck and plug them in.

My detective, unaware I’m back, walks over for a look. He nods in recognition.

“What was it this time?” he asks nonchalantly over the chorus of curses and cries.

“He hit up the wrong thug, got himself shot,” one of the orderlies says, going about his business, oblivious to his vitriolic patient. “But they pulled him through all right… again.”

The detective shaking his head. “A fine specimen of life worth saving, too, aren’t you, jack?”

The patient moans sonorously, wickedly, drooling from his drugged lips.

“And you’ll be right back on the street in no time, won’t you? Lucky me.”

The orderly shaking his head. “Oh no sirree. Not this time, not with a bullet stuck in his spine. He’s gon’ be paralyzed but good.”

“.… mmmore fffuckin morphine, goddmmm sonvbitch! You… ”

His venom, muted by my own narcotic, like a descant to the cries and moans of the general ward. A harmony eerily familiar, like I had known it from before. Like I’d always known it.

The detective back to me again, with his questions. Again I can’t help. He leaves thinking I don’t want to. Thinking I do know something.

Morning. A small throng, public relations and tourism officials, around my bed. Asking did I like the flowers? They had heaped me with even more. My corner of the ward like a blooming Eden in a Sinai of victims. They offer me a private room, paid for by the concert promoters. I’m appreciative; thanks but no, I don’t need special treatment. I ‘m no one to get the red carpet treatment. Just a young troubadour in the wrong place at the wrong time.

When they leave, when time begins to pass again, the white noise counterpoint to my opposites profanity, I am being present and conscious in my own dream. During this time, they amputated his leg. I know because there is only a heavily bandaged stump where there was a leg before.

The head surgeon again, lecturing his interns again, not around me but my malevolent counterpart, my mirror image.  Nodding and taking notes but no one smiling. “The challenge with this particular patient was he’s built up so much tolerance using street dope that there was no way to adequately anesthetize during surgery. Let alone post-op pain.”

As they move on, I beckon the surgeon. Asking to stop my Demerol. Why? Because it was occluding things, things I wanted to be clear on. Too… mystical. He was bemused and at first reluctant, agreed only to switch me to oral and progressively lower the dosage.

In the morning the nurse helps me slide into a wheelchair. In the waiting room outside is a paper. In the crime report section they have my age as 36. Wrong. By 10 hears. They report the assailant got away with only forty dollars, and for that I might be dead. Wrong. It was a hundred and forty dollars. I remember handing it over. I remember he stabbed first and asked later. I don’t remember anything else. His face—I went too quick into shock. I remember only an invisible fiend, grinning, audacious, malevolent. Demanding my money, “… else finish you off good, motherfucker.”

The detective presses for more details. Any details. When it had happened: between midnight and 1:00 a.m. What about the knife? I didn’t see it; I thought he only punched me in the gut. The get-away car, what about the license plate, make, or model, anything about it? I’d lost vision, couldn’t even tell him the color. No, something I do remember, when it screeched up, my assailant jumped in, they turned on the dome light and, driving slowly past me, counting the take, he was laughing. Only that, and also, inside the ambulance, the flashing blue and red on the periphery of my vision.

“So, you did see him. You could recognize him.”

No, I shake my head. I can’t.  He tries again, a recitatif of the same questions, hoping to penetrate my memory, trigger a  clue. But he’s losing patience. I can hear intervals of frustration in his voice. Am I holding something back? No, I have nothing for him.

And I hurt. The cries of the ward, the shrieks of the patient across from me, grating on me. The slabs of my stomach flame and throb where they had been sutured back together. With the lower dosages, I feel delirium come over me. Again and again. Like a new narcotic.

There are two places: where I am, and where I am not. Where I am not is murky, inchoate wisps of movement. Nothing there, yet something there. A presence, what kind, what form, I don’t know, but it’s tempting. It would be so easy. You simply cross over. Cross the line. You don’t care one way or the other. Free to make your own way.

Looking back on it, it was almost the exact hour. Sometime between midnight and 1:00 a.m. Lights out and very dark. My body pounding; my eyes blazing, rising and crossing the aisle, the pain is great but indistinguishable from the dark.

He’s half awake. Comfortably numb from heavy heavy narcotics and his newly severed paralysis. Grinning stuporously at me while I pull away his facial bandage. His eyes barely waver. Audacious. Defiant. I don’t see any recognition. I don’t think he has any idea. Or not caring, one way or the other. Not giving a shit.

But I know now. I knew before but now I know.

The din of the ward is low. Restful. Very dark. I lift then apply the pillow. He too, when he can’t breathe, tied to the bed, in unconscious primordial panic, flails his useless leg, the stump. It’s quiet and doesn’t take that long. But long enough to feel the memory of death as when, being born, he felt life, being slapped into him?

The next morning, the detective had some new questions. Did I know anything about it? About him, the amputated man, the one who died? Did I recognize him? Anything about him? Did he look familiar? Had I ever seen him before?

I don’t know if he knew, that detective. But they released me from the ward later that day.

There were never any more questions.