Author: BlueLight
Acknowledgement: Thanks and Hugs for LadyStarlight's beta
help and advice.
Rating: PG
Distribution: Fine, just let me know where.
Feedback: Please.
Blurb: Drug dreams, war and television and how they all intersect
within a white room.
*********************************************
The planes hid in the high darkness, flew beyond sight, beyond
sound, shadowing the stars, sending down force and fire with
the careful eye of a draftsman drawing a line - thinking "let
it fly here and hit there" - a silent line, its path so true
that prey not in the flickering square of the video screen
need not cringe, though they did. A thousand shells were sent
up, trying in vain to reach the enemy unseen, untouchable,
more distant than the clouds and as immune from punishment
a hail storm, a hell storm. Sparklers of light materialized
with a sound deeper than drums as explosives detonated and
steel and concrete gave way at its blow. The lights rising
or falling through the sky were better than fireworks and
louder. High in the thin, cold air the jets droned steadily,
deadily on. Then the machines begin to drift a little to the
left or right and then back, as though they had lost their
way and turned sniffing from side to side, like dogs on the
track of new game. They began to swerve and make angry circles,
the drone of their engines roughing to a savage buzz. The
wings trembled and the steel, the aluminum, the titanium made
a terrible sound as it half cracked away from the fuselage.
The wings became transparent, veined, as delicately gnarled
as an old man's hands and their noisy quivering increased.
The bodies thickened and yellow and black stripes grew on
a softer skin as they metamorphosed into furious, fat hornets,
swarming, their anger reinforcing itself and then suddenly
they darted down and alighted on her bare breasts, digging
their spiny toes into her tender flesh, stabbing tiny poisonous
daggers into her paled skin, striking again and again with
the berserker joy of a maddened insect untill the pain filled
her with an agony stifling her breath and whipping her heart.
Her mind reached out trying to force them away, trying to
pull herself out of it. It was like trying to pull herself
from the bottom of a well with arms weak and trembling. With
a breathless effort, her heart pounding, she wrenched herself
out of her dream and opened her eyes to CNN and a reporter
exuberantly describing the bombing of Baghdad. The dream faded
but the pain did not. She fumbled with a small button, pushed
it and felt a tiny wave of disorientation as the morphine
hit her.
The room flickered in the mushroom glow of the TV, dark and
light, moonlight, twilight, shade and shimmer. The bed wrapped
itself around her like a mother cat, circling her pain in
softness and warmth. She snuggled into the comfort of clean
sheets, white blankets, gave herself over to a sterile facade
arranged to sustain the illusion that even the worst of life
can be controlled, subdued, forced into compliance with the
desires of a single species, of a single person. She wondered
if the people of Baghdad had any illusion of control tonight
as the lights that flickered through their sky brought not
just bright and frightening images but real death. She flicked
the TV from channel to channel but there was only one show
on, the side show of distant horror and death interspersed
with commercials for weapons systems, free commercials that
would have cost the arms industry millions but now all the
networks called them news and cheerily showed them for free,
as filler to distract their audience from the fact that they
had few facts to give as the anchors, the correspondents,
repeated the same sparse information again and again. Only
the shills for those who profited from these weapons had much
to say as they praised their products, insisting that money
spent on it was well spent and tyrants in far places watched
and remembered.
On a vampire quest a skeleton wrapped in white entered her
room muttering soft nothings. Bony fingers pulled up her gown
to examine the white bandages taped to her chest, searching
for blood with a hand it had only now retrieved from an icy
locker in the morgue. The quivering light shimmered on its
cheek bones, but could not reach the dark hollow of its eye.
Then down with her night clothes and up with her bed clothes
and the skeleton rattled away, looking for death, its master,
in other rooms, in other beds, making sure the sick were sick
to death and that the dying did not die in peace.
She twisted and turned trying to find some ease but pain
and death had disturbed her high, prying away the little comfort
she had found, like an evil brother who would steal your covers
just to hear you cry and then deny he had ever touched you.
She took another hit of the morphine, one every six minute
was the limit, but only 20 in 4 hours. If she pulled it down
faster than that or used up what the technological wonder
would give her then she would have to take from her own hard
won and long saved stash of drugs, maybe some Percocet or
Phenaphen with Coedine. She did not plan to allow anyone else
decide if she would hurt or not. Not as long as there was
any way she could control it herself.
Soft sounds, hiss and mutter. Distant voices, quiet halls,
soft shoes, the squeak of rubber against linoleum. The very
building seemed to mutter, the soft calls of thousands of
souls, more pain and death than Dachau, but the cleanliness
kept the ghosts at bay, the cool sheets, the shiny floors,
the soft night voices muffled them, muted their screams as
they cried and complained, whispered of their suffering or
lamented their deaths, dying, they claimed, just as they were
finally about to achieve happiness, fulfillment, some satisfaction
in life, if only they had not had to die just then. If only,
they cried, they had another chance. They muttered and moaned,
cried and screamed in soft distant whispers she couldn't quite,
could almost understand, and then mixed with their screams
the distant whine of a police car, or an ambulance, or an
air raid siren - then
There was a clear blue sky, as silent as a picture, as still
as emptiness can make alone. A bruise appeared on the sheet
of blue, a dark ugly spreading thing that was pain to look
at, a thing that grew and replicated as the sky was struck
again by black and grey, as violence struck at the indifference
of a perfect sky - proving that even it was not immune from
the struggle below, that even it must submit, must suffer
and be destroyed. The wounds spread until the sky was gray,
then black as the soot and oil from a thousand burning oil
wells joined to obliterate clear blue from the colors things
where allowed to be. The palate changed to gray, the gray
of concrete broken into fragments, crushed into rubble that
clawed all that trod on it, to black, the soot black of oily
smoke, of asphalt, of the darkness inside a tomb, to brown,
the rusty brown of tangled steel. People were painted with
the ashen faces of fear and the bright red of new blood.
She found herself in the dark sky, a huge butterfly, moving
slowly, in slow motion flexing her wings with a languid wave
that was more show than support. It took so little to keep
her aloft in the heavy air. The soot and oil darkened her
wings until they were black velvet, the tiny scales of their
giant surfaces as dark as the starless sky, as soft as the
dark clouds, but with the iridescent rainbow shimmer of oil
on water. She stirred the heavy air with her soft wings, their
sounds as muffled as silk falling on cotton, and she watched
the city below. The lights, the few white lights, the many
fires, their red and gold were like jewels in the darkness.
No people, just a spectacle. To watch, to appreciate, as she
floated and soared, no pain just a picture. At least, no pain
for her. A spotlight lanced the sky, spoiling its perfect
inky blackness, sweeping around like a sword wielded by a
blind hand. It caught her shadow, picked out her nearly invisible
form. Slowly at first, then with increasing speed and density,
balls of light began to float up like helium filled balloons,
reaching her and exploding on her dark wings, some leaving
bright circles, others washing down their sides in a slowly
dimming haze of color as beautiful as fading fireworks. The
light made patterns in the darkness that gave beauty to the
night. She lazily moved her wings until she was up beyond
the sooty clouds and then admired herself in the dim light,
certainly, she thought, as pretty as the stars. She giggled
to herself and thought how glad she was that she was not human
and below, that she could enjoy the images of suffering and
destruction without being forced to feel pain or pity, just
interest and an aesthetic appreciation. War was pretty, wasn't
it? It always got good ratings. It wouldn't be any fun at
all to be human, to be weak and forced to suffer for the sins
of the powerful. She floated with the stars until the wing
muscles in her chest begin to ache, the pain growing greater
and greater until she could not bear another beat of her wings
and ripped them away out of her body and begin to fall, down
through the stars, down through the dark clouds into a dim
light, into pain, into a white room with a hazy TV showing
scenes of death and destruction, and this time the pain did
not yield to the morphine. She waited as the clock ticked
away the minutes and Baghdad burned and people cowered in
their basements frozen in fear. At last the time passed and
with another brief sting the pain faded. But not completely.
Her eyes closed, drifting in a fuzzy picture, nagged by pain,
watching the shadows moving across the backs of her eyelids
turned to flowers, white flowers, big white roses, their petals
drooping, folded back from their pistils, their whiteness
filling her vision, bright, so bright they were painful to
look at as cold fingers pulled at her clothes and one voice
tried to make itself heard over the hiss and squeak of the
ghosts. Finally the touch, the sound stopped but the bright
flowers remained. She squinted her closed eyes, wrinkled her
forehead, pulled back her lips in a frozen grimace as the
ceiling blew away, leaving the jagged edges of a wounded building
dripping dust into the sun's bright white light, making a
haze of powder that settled on the sheets, on her body, until
her skin was as gray as the concrete and as still and hard.
She could move but her body could not and she refused to leave
without it. None of that astral projection stuff for her.
She began to hear struggling, muttering sounds, then a door
was pushed open with a grunt. Someone walked to her side but
she couldn't turn her body's head to see who. There was a
clear voice, not the grumbling of dead shadows, but something
foreign whose words she couldn't understand. A hand touched
her arm, tried to move it but it was stiff, stiff from shoulder
to wrist. The hand let go and the stumbling footsteps went
away leaving her in the dust with the sun prying at her eyelids,
trying to force them open more than a slit.
A bird drifted through the white sky, glided down to the
rough skylight last night had left in the roof. It peered
down into the opening, cocking its head this way and that
and then flew its sooty self down to her cheek. It peered
up into the slits of her eyes as though trying to see a worm
in a hole. Then it reached out and pulled her eyelashes. It
pecked at her eyes, trying to open them to the sun and she
couldn't move or breathe, couldn't ignore the bird or force
it away. She concentrated and at last moved her arm and threw
it over her eyes. The arm tingled as, freed from the pressure
of her body, it slowly came awake. In the shade of her arm,
protected from the white glare of the light at the head of
her bed, the light the nurse had forgotten to turn off, she
was able to open her eyes. She moaned and shifted her weight,
turned herself so she could reach the button for the morphine
then gave herself a hit. When the pain eased she tried all
the buttons on the control panel of her bed, trying to turn
the damn thing off but it was the light controlled from beside
the door. She whimpered in frustration and anger at the thought
of getting up to turn it off. The nurse would not find turning
off the light a high priority activity. It might be an hour
before she could get anyone to bring her darkness and leave
her in peace. She took another buzz of the morphine and with
many moans and cries slowly inched herself off the bed and
over to the chair holding her bag. She rummaged through it
with her left hand, feeling through bills and checks, pill
bottles and pens, and, at the bottom of her overstuffed purse,
found the cold metal of the vise grip. She had brought it
with her just for this, by no means unique, situation. The
nurses would sometimes do it four or five times a night. She
had learned a hospital was a bad place to be sick. She stood
up and crept crying to the door, trailing the tubes and wires
leading to an IV pole and, attached to it, a gray box labeled
Patient Controlled Anesthesia. The light was on a dimmer knob.
She had trouble adjusting the vise grip because she couldn't
move her arm without agony, but she was finally able to wrench
the knob away leaving the light in a permanent off position.
Now the lights could only be turned on by the buttons at the
head of the bed and could be turned off from them as well.
Now she could control it herself. Until they fixed it and
she lost that little control again. Exhausted and dragging
the paraphernalia of illness in her wake, she finally made
her way to the soft, clean sheets, and, gritting her teeth,
managed to insert herself between them.
She put on some little headphones and turned on a tape that
hissed like the sound in a shell. She shook with pain for
a time then, in the darkness, drifted into the sea. Slowly
the sound of surf drowned out the ghosts. The creak of a sailboat,
the lapping of water obliterated the imagined sounds of bombs.
She slowly drifted to a place where phantoms didn't whisper
outside her door or stare over the end of her bed. She lay
on a smooth wooden deck under a golden sun. There was a wind
cooling her and flapping a sail overhead. She crawled to the
edge of the deck, careful of her arm and chest, and looked
down into the day glow blue waters then slipped head first
over the side, her breasts suddenly gone, her arms replaced
by flat things without fingers and her skin not tender but
cool and rubbery, as slick as a beach ball, as solid as a
tire. She went straight to the bottom and buried her enormous
new nose in the sand and hung there, upside down, listening
to the chuck, grunt, and click of a thousand fish. Effortlessly
she propelled herself to nearby coral reef, thinking whatever
her body was instead of hip and legs and feet (she couldn't
see that part), it worked better in the water than even the
plastic swimfins she had had as a child. She hung over the
reef, head down, and watched rainbows and flowers swimming
around in the shape of fishes. She pushed herself a little
closer to the mottled brown surface and saw a little neon
sign on a tiny fish. It was velvet black with a clear, nearly
invisible tail and was covered with a rash of glowing neon
spots, brighter blue than those come-along lights lining an
airport runway taking you into someplace new. At her approach
it darted into a hole in the coral. She could see it moving
in the blackness, no shape, just the neon dots, shinning as
bright as the tracers in the sky over Baghdad. Where it was
finally dawn and the night was drifting away leaving sadness
and smoke, pain and fear.
***********************************
This is basically a drug dream of the bombing of Baghdad
and how we comfort ourselves with drugs, illusions, and dreams,
the biggest one being that we control anything.
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