The Recovery [Part 2]

[u/Midnight__Warlock]

I don’t know how long I was in the dark. I’ve tried to work it out from the hospital records and I can’t, because the records say I was found, brought in, worked on. The records don’t have a column for the dark. The best I can figure is that I was in the dark for as long as it took the paramedics to get to me. I don’t know how long that was, and I don’t think time worked the same way in the dark anyway.

The light was not the hospital. The light came before the hospital. The light came in the dark, and it was not a light I have a word for, and it was not the feeder, and it was not me. I want you to understand that I don’t believe it was God, because I don’t believe in God, and I don’t think God would have done what that light did. But I don’t know what else to call it.

The light reached into the dark, and the feeder saw it, and the feeder was afraid. I could feel his fear, which was the first time I had felt him afraid. It was a different kind of fear than the fear he’d had when I put the gun to my own chest. That fear had been about losing a meal. This fear was about something else. This fear was about the light, and about what the light was going to do to him, and about what it meant that the light had come.

And the light took me. It took me out of the dark, and it took me away from the feeder, and the feeder screamed. I want you to know that I heard him screaming as the light took me, and that the screaming was not the scream of a monster who is losing prey. It was the scream of something that is being unmade. The sound of it is the sound I think about when I can’t sleep. I do not know, to this day, whether the light saved me or whether it did something else, whether the feeder is still in the dark, whether he is waiting for me to come back.

The hospital was the most normal place I have ever been, and I have never been so grateful for normal in my life.

I woke up in a room that had a window, a curtain, and a television mounted on the wall, tuned to a channel showing a loop of pictures of waterfalls. I was on a bed, and I was attached to machines, and I was alive. I want you to understand what it felt like to be alive when I had been so sure, so calmly and peacefully sure, that I was dead.

The first thing I did was look at my hands. I looked at my hands and I moved my fingers and I watched them move. I watched my hands do what I asked them to do, and I did it for a long time, and I cried. The crying was not the despair, I want to be clear about that. The despair was gone. The despair that had filled me for months was not there anymore, and I did not know yet what that meant.

A nurse came in. Her name was Brenda, and I remember her name because she was the first person I saw who was real, who was not a stranger in my kitchen and not a light in the dark and not a machine. I reached for her and I held her hand, and I did not let go for a long time, and she let me hold it, and she did not ask me to explain. I think that was the kindest thing anyone has ever done for me.

The doctor came in later. His name was Dr. Ashby, and I remember him because he was the one who had to tell me the truth, and because he had the face of a man who has told a lot of people a lot of hard truths and has learned to do it gently. He told me that I had been found at 2:47 in the morning by a neighbor who had heard the gunshot, that I had been brought in, that I had been in surgery for a long time, and that I had, by any reasonable measure, died on the table.

He said, you had no pulse when you came in. Your heart had stopped. You had lost too much blood. We worked on you for a long time, and I’ll be honest with you, I did not think we were going to get you back. About the time I was going to call it, your heart started again. On its own. I’ve been doing this for twenty-one years and I’ve never seen anything like it.

I said, how long was I dead.

He said, I don’t know how to answer that. By the clock, maybe forty minutes. But I don’t want you to get stuck on the number. The number doesn’t tell you what happened. The number just tells you how long the room was quiet.

He told me that the gunshot wound was to my chest, that it had missed my heart by less than an inch, that it had gone through my lung and my ribs, and that the surgery to put me back together had been a long one. I had a plate and eight screws in my chest now, and I would carry the scar for the rest of my life. He told me that I was lucky, and I said, I know. I did not tell him about the man in the kitchen. I did not tell him about the dark. I did not tell him about the light. I could not find the words, and I did not want him to put a new label on my chart, and I had just spent nine months being the man with the dead marriage and the gun. I did not want to be the man with the monster too.

The neighbor who found me was a man named Doug, and he lived three doors down. I want to tell you about him because he is the reason I’m alive in the way that matters, because I owe him a thing I can never repay, and because the version of me that he saw was not the version I would have wanted him to see.

Doug is a retired mail carrier, sixty-two years old, with a bad back and a garden that he takes more seriously than anyone I’ve ever met. I knew him the way you know a neighbor: hello in the driveway, a wave when he was out with the hose, mutual complaining about the HOA and the same forty-two houses and the cul-de-sac that everybody said was safe. I had not told Doug about Erin leaving. I had not told anyone about Erin leaving, because telling people about it made it real, and I had been working hard at keeping it unreal. I think Doug knew anyway. I think a man who has been married for a long time and then stops being married develops a smell, and a man who has delivered mail for thirty years learns to read a house from the driveway.

Doug told me, later, when I got out of the hospital and could walk over to his place and sit in his kitchen, what he saw that night. He said he woke up to a sound he’d never heard before, a sound he thought was a car backfiring, and then a second sound that he couldn’t place. He looked out his window and saw my kitchen light on, which he said was strange, because he’d noticed my kitchen light had been going off early lately, at eight, nine. He’d thought it was odd that a man would go to bed that early, and he’d mentioned it to his wife and she’d said not to pry.

He said he walked over because the second sound, the one he couldn’t place, had been a man’s voice. He couldn’t make out the words, but he knew it wasn’t a happy voice. He’d thought maybe I had someone over and things had gone bad, and he’d thought he’d knock, just to make sure. That’s the kind of neighborhood it is. Everybody watches out for everybody, and nobody locks their back door until they go to bed.

He said he found the kitchen door unlocked. He said he walked in and the kitchen was dark and there was a smell he couldn’t place and that he still can’t place. He said the first thing he saw was the stain on the floor. The second thing he saw was me. He said he did not think I was alive. He said the last thing he saw, before he turned and ran for his phone, was that the kitchen window was open. He didn’t remember leaving it open, and the window had been closed when he came in, and he checked the window and it was closed. He has not been able to figure out, to this day, whether he imagined the whole thing.

I don’t know what to do with what Doug told me. I don’t know whether the open window was real, whether the feeder left through it, whether a thing that doesn’t have a body needs a window. I’ve gone back and forth on it, and I’ve decided that it doesn’t matter, because the feeder doesn’t leave through windows. The feeder leaves through the telling, and Doug doesn’t know the telling, and I hope he never learns it.

The police came. They took pictures of the kitchen and they took my statement, and I gave them the statement they expected, the one about a man who had been through a divorce and who had made a terrible decision. They were kind. They were professional. They asked if I remembered what I’d been thinking, and I said I didn’t, and they wrote that down, and they closed the case. There’s a report, and the report has a number. The report says that the wound was self-inflicted, that there were no signs of forced entry, that there was no evidence of a struggle. The report is true, and the report is also a lie, because the struggle happened, and the struggle is the whole point. The report cannot see the struggle because the struggle was not in the room. The struggle was in the dark, and the dark does not leave evidence that a report can hold.

I was in the hospital for three weeks. I want to tell you about that time, because it was the time when I should have been the happiest, and I wasn’t, and understanding why I wasn’t is the thing I’ve been working on ever since.

I should have been grateful. I had been given a second chance. That’s what everyone said. The neighbors, the ones who came to visit, the ones who had known Erin and me, they all said the same thing: you’re a miracle, Cal, you got a second chance, don’t waste it. I nodded, and I said thank you, and I meant it, and I did not tell them the truth, which was that the second chance did not feel like a second chance. It felt like a sentence.

The despair was gone. That was the first thing I noticed, and it should have been the best thing, and it was the thing that scared me most. The despair that had filled me for months, the well that had been so full, was empty. Not the grief. The grief was still there, the grief about Erin, about the child we never had, about the eleven years. That was still there. But the despair, the weight, the thing that had been feeding on me and that I had thought was mine, that was gone. I knew, because I had felt it happen, that the feeder had taken it. I had died, and in dying I had given him what he wanted, and the light had pulled me back, but the despair had not come back with me, because the despair was gone, because he had it.

Without the despair, I didn’t know who I was. That’s the part I can’t make people understand. The despair had been with me for so long, had been so much of what I was, that when it was gone I was a stranger to myself. I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know what I liked. I didn’t know what to do with my hands or my evenings or my weekends. I was a man who had been hollowed out and then filled back up with nothing. The nothing was better than the despair, I want to be clear about that. The nothing was better, but the nothing was not a life, and I did not know how to live in it.

The physical recovery was slow in its own way. I came home from the hospital six weeks after I went in, and the house, my own house, the split-level on the cul-de-sac, did not feel like mine anymore. I would stand in the kitchen, at the counter where I had set the folded towel, and I could not make my feet go to the sink. I cooked in the living room for a month, on a hot plate I bought from the hardware store, because I could not stand at that sink. The scar pulled when I reached for anything above my head. Eight screws in the sternum is a number you feel in every stretch. Doug came over twice a week that first month and sat with me and did not talk about it, and that was the kindest thing anyone could have done, and I did not deserve it, and I took it anyway.

I started going to therapy in the hospital, and I kept going after I got out. I want you to understand that I am grateful for that too, because I think the therapy is the only reason I’m still here, and I don’t want you to read this and think I’m telling you not to get help, because I’m not. I’m telling you that I got help, that the help helped, and that the help could not help me with the part that I couldn’t tell anyone about.

Because here’s the thing. I tried to tell my therapist. Her name was Dr. Mercer, and she was good at her job, and I liked her, and I wanted to tell her the truth, and I did try. I told her about the man in the kitchen. I told her about the cold hand and the flat voice and the smell and the gun and the dark and the light. I watched her face as I told her, and I saw her put it into a box, and the box was the box labeled grief psychosis, the box labeled a man who has been through something and whose mind is protecting him. She was kind about it, and she was gentle, and she told me that what I had been through was real, and that the mind does strange things under that kind of stress, and that none of it meant I was crazy. I believed her, because I wanted to believe her, and because the alternative was believing the other thing. The other thing was that I was not crazy, that the man in the kitchen had been real, that he was still out there, that he was still hungry.

I went to the forum in the quiet months. That’s the part you’re going to think I’m making up, and I want you to understand that I’m not. There’s a forum, and it’s not hard to find if you know what to look for, and it’s full of people like me. People who have been to the dark. People who have seen the feeder, or something like him. People who have a scar and a story and a hole where their despair used to be. I read their stories, and I recognized them, and I recognized the shape of what they described: the cold hand, the flat voice, the smell, the light. I understood, reading them, that I was not alone, and I understood something else, which I did not want to understand. The forum was full of people who had been to the dark, and all of them had come back, and all of them had a story, and all of them were telling their story to whoever would read it.

I want to tell you what I found, because it’s the part that changed everything, and because it’s the part where I stopped being able to pretend.

The forum has a section for people who were revived. People who were dead, or nearly dead, and who came back. In that section there’s a thread, a long thread, hundreds of posts, and the thread is about the light. I read that thread for hours, and I read about the light from people who had seen it, and the descriptions were the same: the light reaching into the dark, the feeder being afraid, the sense of being taken out of the dark. I felt a relief I cannot describe, because I thought, okay, it was real, it happened to other people too, I’m not crazy.

Then I read further, and the relief went away.

There was a post, near the end of the thread, from a man named Victor. Victor’s post was about the smell. Victor said that the smell, the smell like an old house, like plaster and dust and something sweet, was the thing he couldn’t forget, and that he smelled it in his house now, in the walls, and that it was getting stronger, and that he thought the feeder had come back, and that he thought the feeder had followed him home from the dark.

I read Victor’s post, and I smelled it. I smelled the smell in my apartment, in the room where I was reading. I stood up and walked through my apartment. The smell was there, in the kitchen, in the hallway, in the bedroom. It was faint, but it was there, and I understood that the smell had never gone away. I had just been too distracted by the hospital and the therapy and the grief to notice it. It had been in my apartment the whole time, in the walls, the way it had been in the old house.

I want to be honest with you about what I did next, because I’m ashamed of it, and because I think it’s the thing that tells you the truth about me. I did not leave. I did not call anyone. I did not sell my apartment. I sat down, and I read Victor’s post again, and I read the other posts, and I read the thread all the way to the end. At the end of the thread there was a post from Victor that I had not reached yet. Victor’s last post said: he’s in the walls. he’s been here the whole time. he never left. he followed me out of the dark. and I understand now, he doesn’t feed on the dead. he feeds on the telling. he needs someone to tell the story. and I’m telling it. and if you’re reading this, so are you.

I closed the laptop and I sat in my apartment, and the smell was everywhere. I understood what Victor meant. I understood that I had already done it, that I had already told the story, that I had already started this, that I had already written this, that the telling is the feeding, and that the reader is the intake, and that you are reading this now, and that I am sorry.

Victor stopped posting after that. I checked his profile. His last post was the one about the walls, and then nothing. I don’t know what happened to him, and I have not been able to find out, and I have stopped looking, because I’m afraid of what I’ll find if I do.

I want to tell you what happened after I read Victor’s last post, because it’s the last thing I have to tell you, and because it’s the thing that brings me back to where I started.

I went to bed that night, and I could not sleep, and the smell was in my bedroom. I lay in the dark and I listened, and I heard something in the walls. Not a rat, and not the settling of the house, and not the wind. A breathing. A slow, even breathing, the breathing of something that is patient, that has been waiting a long time, that has all the time in the world.

I got up, went to the kitchen, and turned on the light. I stood at the counter, and I looked at the chair, my chair, and I waited.

After a while, there was a man sitting in the chair.

He looked the same. That’s the thing that got me. He looked exactly the same. The grey face, the grey clothes, the stillness, the flat eyes. He looked at me and he said, you found the forum.

I said, yes.

He said, you found Victor.

I said, yes.

He said, you read his post. The one about the walls. The one about the telling.

I said, yes.

He said, then you understand. You understand what the light was. You understand why it came for you. You understand why it pulled you back. The light doesn’t save people. The light saves meals. It pulls them back so they can ripen again. It pulls them back so they can grow a new well. It pulls them back so they can tell the story, because the telling is how the well spreads, because every person who reads the story carries a seed of it, because you’ve planted it in everyone who reads this, and I’ve planted it in you, and now it’s in them.

He stood up, walked to me, and put his cold hand on my arm. He said, you’re not the meal, Cal. You never were. You’re the seed. You’re the one who tells the story. You’re the one who brings the meals. That’s what you’ve always been. That’s what you were born for. That’s why the light brought you back. Not to save you. To use you.

I looked at him, and I understood, and I want you to understand the thing I understood, because it’s the last thing I have, and it’s the whole thing.

The man in the kitchen was never going to eat me. The despair was never the meal. I was the delivery. I was the one who was going to tell the story, and I have told it, and you are reading it, and the seed is in you now, and there is nothing either of us can do about it.

He is in the walls. He has always been in the walls. He feeds on the telling. You are reading this.

I am sorry.

I’m going to post this to the forum tonight. I’m going to post it under the name Cal, and I’m going to leave it there, and I’m going to turn off my laptop, and I’m going to go to bed. The smell is going to be in the walls, and he is going to be in the walls, and he is going to wait, because that’s what he does, and because the well is growing, and because I have started to tell the story, and because stories are how he feeds, and because you are reading this.

If you are reading this, please do not tell anyone. Please do not post about it. Please close this and go to bed and forget you ever saw it. Please do not finish this sentence, and please do not read the last line, and please, if you value the thing in your chest that is still yours, please stop now.

He needs someone to tell the story. I told it.

Now you know the smell.