The Plot to Escape — The Prelude
As I lay on the hospital bed, Jhumpa Lahiri’s words circled through my head, influencing my thoughts and actions but I couldn’t bring them to my tongue. I always thought I had an unflagging conscience, a profound sense of right conduct. I watched the trees bend under the fierce winds, leaves move in a spiral fashion with elegance and the soft powdery snow impress the leaves. I continued to pretend to not be there as I pushed aside the hanging cloth that was used as a blind. I suddenly had a Christmasy feeling. It was the middle of the month of March. I finally recalled Jhumpa Lahiri’s words that conveyed great energy with her imaginative lively style.
“Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.”
I imagined my life unfold, blossom into maturity, spread out its arms and call out to the characters that have lived and breathed in the past and the ones who energize my existence today. I have inhabited all the islands that are now deserted, homes that were once furnished with life, energy that has morphed in accordance with its surroundings, and touched lives that once had a healthy capacity for vigorous activity.
I thought to myself: everyone makes decisions based upon their observations. Through these observations, we create a story about what happened. We live in our stories. We manage in them and lead others in them. When we lead in the context of our stories, we are able to take on new challenges and bigger roles. The reality is that we learn and change who we are through experience, through our stories. Our stories often flash in front of our eyes, momentarily, for a very short time, as much as the time it takes for the heart to beat and the eye to blink. It’s a burst of life, these stories, that communicate with us in our darkest of times.
It’s the familiar hospital faculty of smell that brought back all the memories that day, like a short news announcement concerning some on-going story, gleaming and glowing, running through my fingers hastily. My head was spinning, adding excitement to my seemingly quotidian stay on the hospital bed. I felt like I was in a rapid descent of an aircraft in a steep spiral. It had been a week since I had worn that gown of misery and sympathy, a strange sort of wretchedness that was simply intolerable. Right next to me was another girl who seemed to be skipping around in the field of bombs, mistaking it for daisies. She exasperated with a sudden sense of purpose and I could hear frustration radiate out from the depths of her skin.
Lying there in the midst of such melancholic apprehension, I learned all her secrets, where every body was buried. And that is why if I were her, I would’ve picked up every chip I had left, and run, run for my life. There had been unsubstantiated rumors that her husband had left her, desolate and empty, over a text message, abandoned and penniless, as if she had no meaning in this world. She had been in that relationship for over a decade when he had decided to end it as if even the warranty period was over. It was not an everyday occurrence in anyone’s ordinary course of life. The so-called glorious relationship had come to an inglorious end. The symphony had ended spatially and metaphorically, with her bronchioles terminating in the capillary bed and she was left with no rights to valentines and anniversary gifts.
I continued to lay on the bed attempting to put her story to bed but twitter had it trending, pouring gasoline over the stage as the girl, who shared the deplorable hospital space with me, played the good soldier. I sensed tension holding the belts of her pulley and at that moment all I could think of was to scream out loud. “Smile little duckling, the world is watching. That is the only true service, your only true calling.”
Suddenly, my phone beeped. I silenced it. I was seeking absence of sound as a quiet throng of onlookers passed by me. The room was dark and quiet, with a subdued whisper, a quiet reprimand of some sort decorated with muted trumpets, hushed voices, and our placid existence. The phone disrupted the period of this calm ambiance that we had managed to surround ourselves in. And yet, my mind was agitated no matter how hard I tried to quiet the dragons of fear and worry. Stemming from evil forces, my heart had concocted yet another black undercurrent. And then my mind woke up along with my body, from the alternate universe where abstraction and reality had merged together, roused and conscious in the present state of mind. How did I get here?
The hot spiced tea that I had requested the nurse to bring, burned the tip of my tongue refusing to care about my mental condition, fighting to alert my nerves and brain cells, encouraging me to face the day ahead of me. I was still not showing acute awareness, not awake to the reality of my predicament. Maybe the sound of the patients being wheeled into emergency rooms would stir me? Oscar Wilde once said, and I quote,
“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
I fell back asleep in search of that state prevailing during absence of war, back in dreamland. It was like I was determined on signing a treaty to end hostilities and couldn’t find a way of doing it in my real world. Showing brooding ill humor, a glum and hopeless nurse came in to check our vitals, almost hoping she wouldn’t find the pulse. She had a morose and unsociable manner, one that was sullen and lacked any sort of culture.
I suppose I did not appreciate her style; it was obscure to me. Weren’t we the ones who were in an unenlightened state, gasping for breath every minute? However, it was her discourse that dispelled darkness, with her sour temper and moody silence. Harshly uninviting, the nurse did her duty mechanically.
She had, what I believe T.S. Eliot had alluded to as, “a mind not gifted to discover truth but tenacious to hold it.” I immunologically resisted the introduction of foreign tissues inside me. So, I was formally labeled a rebel by the nurse and her like minded friends. I did not care, because they hushed it up out of fear of public reaction anyway. All I did care about was that I did not want any medicine or therapy to relieve my pain. Those quacks only pretended to heal patients but never managed to. That was my version of reality. Nobody could restore me by replacing some part or putting together what was torn and broken.
Perhaps, they could fix some variables in my life, specify some parameters that were not previously specified, preserve and harden me to prepare me for a microscopic study. But I knew I was infertile, genetically disabled whether I was officially diagnosed or not. Still, there were days when I would wake up in the fantasy land where I was playing with my children, their laughter bouncing off the walls, their isolated disjointed words echoing, their manifestation of joy and mirth of scorn presenting reasons and argument, it all just felt like a fantastic but vain hope.
Our not so friendly nurse departed politely, but parting was not such a sweet sorrow in this case. She didn’t really leave because I could still hear her chitchat in the hallway outside, neglecting and forgetting our room behind her, leaving our state of misery unchanged and undisturbed. This only allowed for one conclusion. The blood stains she left behind on the napkin next to my bed had to removed.
We had to take charge of our own condition, be our own master, like an artist of consummate skill. We needed to be combatants and defeat our rivals by commanding the ship. All that was left now, was to convince my roommate to become my partner in crime or an associate working towards a common goal, but I wasn’t sure if she would assist me in this plot to escape.
I needed to convince her that escaping would mean escaping affliction and misfortune. I could only hope that she felt the same intense unhappiness that I felt and was also exhausted by the grief that the nurse and doctors spread over a considerable extent.
As I pushed myself in an upright state, I suddenly felt aroused with an uncontrolled emotion, maybe even a mad whirl of pleasure but I did not approach my roommate with the proposal yet. I quietly pretended to be normal and spread a not so tasty mixture on bread and crackers that I had stolen from the wretched nurse earlier in the day.
Delirious as it may sound, I was like a molecule made reactive now, energized and frantic in my own gaiety. Yes, you could say my flight would be an indication of my guilt but I was already living in a romantic novel escaping from my stresses, running away from confinement. I wanted to be like a wrongfully convicted murderer who would successfully escape from a high security prison.
With that, I began plotting my grand escape, the escape from that pitiable and depressing hospital.
