Motorcycle from Hell

: Green light for lust for life

29 March 2020

I still remember the breeze on my jet-black frizz above my forehead, curled that afternoon over my face like pubic hair. It was sunny, yet on two wheels you can never say sunny. It’s always cool, even a leather jacket, leather pants, and boots often can’t stand up to the weather. I don’t recall the bend on the road, it all happened in a split second. No time to think, I guess. Even later. Everything else after seems to be covered in black paint blurring my vision, as a tinted rear-view mirror. The cliff was steep, too high to notice the curve. I will never forget that bright, sharp flash of light coming from the sun… I forgot my sunglasses and we were shooting a movie on my Jawa motorcycle with my best friend Konstantinos who is a film director. I just call him ‘Phuzz’ and he got this nickname because he makes too much fuss about himself, which is always good for a filmmaker. You know, self-promotion and all that stuff. He was educated at Preston, which is always mistaken for the prestigious Princeton, with the slight difference being that Preston is near Blackpool in England and Princeton in New Jersey in the United States. He returned here to Mykonos, one of the Greek islands, his homeland to make films, although I don’t think he would ever dare to try again. I don’t know where he is now, the doctor’s eyes became as transparent as water in the Aegean Sea when I asked him this question some time ago. Is my friend really dead? It’s terrible if he is. Dr. Galen said that I should forget about my past life as there may be times when I wake up the next day without being able to recognise anyone around me so I should prepare myself for that. What did he mean by that? How can I not recognise anyone? I’m not old, I don’t have Alzheimer’s yet. So how could I not…

Slumber…

Postoperative coma…

Amnesia…

Disorientation…

29 May 2020

The stench of the hospital ward resembles an abandoned library. All the copies, ancient and modern, locked in a tiny room, would do a similar exhibition to this medical equipment having fun here. Silver metal beds covered with white sheets; machinery that measures the sound of life as long as the patients are alive; the green walls, which are supposed to evoke the memory of the forest in the eyes of patients, are in fact only a poor imitation of the life of nature. Dr. Galen looks at me inquiringly on each of his visits, which is around 10 a.m. each morning. I can see him, but can’t say anything. What happened to me? Why I’m unable to utter a single syllable? I don’t remember anything as if had no backup memory, as if I was a completely blank slate. A tabula rasa. Aristotle had something to say about it, the doctor did not fail to convey to me the Greek philosophy served on an antique plate instead of breakfast:

Haven't we already disposed of the difficulty about interaction involving a common element, when we said that mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until it has thought? What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing-tablet on which as yet nothing stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind.

– Aristotle, De Anima

My mind appears to be like a blank canvas, a blank sheet of paper to write upon it? But I don’t have any stories to tell, do I? Perhaps in a past life I would have had something to say while I was alive, but not now. Right now, I’m enveloped in these green walls like inside a cocoon made of moss, unable to feel, think, or say anything. Dr. Galen politely advised me to be patient, to live up to the Stoic school as if nothing had happened, and then maybe someday everything would miraculously come back to me at once, like by a wave of a magic wand. But I don’t believe in fairies. I’m not a child. I’m not even a Peter Pan to believe this bullshit. And when can this eventually happen? Time flies on that white sheet, amid this damn machinery beeping, squeaking, and displaying all sorts of green lights in the shape of diagrams, triangles, and weird squares all day and night, and my ward’s swinging doors make that disturbing noise resembling a scared skinned cat. My head is swollen like a basketball, the doctor said it’s after the drip and the drugs in it. What kind of drugs? Are they working to put me back to sleep? I do not want! I want to live, even if in this bloody hospital ward for the rest of my days. But I would like to know what kind of medications they are treating me with, what kind of shit they inject me every morning and evening. I don’t know what all this really means? Am I already dead, is it just purgatory or hell or whatever it is that I went through against my will to do what? Maybe to wait my turn to enter eternity?

Dr. Galen is carefully inspecting my patient card and intravenous drip. Everything seems stable. Pulse, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels are checked several times a day by a very young nurse. She is also obliged to regularly check my temperature in the wake of some pandemic invasion of the human population. I don’t know what any of this means. Now that I am awake, there will also be routine weight and height checks from time to time. What for? Maybe to measure the size of the coffin? No one has visited me yet, or perhaps someone did while I was asleep? The doctor said it was two months during which so much has changed around the world, although he couldn’t give me more details. That was just to avoid the unnecessary risk of high blood pressure, he said. But what could possibly upset me? There’s no one I know here, the walls that surround me are unfamiliar, and neither are the other patients who are just silent. As far as I know. Maybe they speak when I’m asleep? Or taking pictures of me, for Pete’s sake? I need to explore the area as soon as I acquire the ability to articulate one word. Will I have to study like kids in school now, scribbling each unaccustomed letter with wobbly handwriting, compiling it into a whole sentence, then a paragraph, and a whole page at the end? Will I then become an entire book if I manage to transcript the incomprehensible abstract objects of my mind’s production into comprehensible, real objects that occurred on paper? Will I connect the dots into one fully rounded masterpiece to be flawlessly noticeable from a distance? Could someone provide me with an answer for once? I’m tired of waiting, even though I find this bloody nurse damn attractive, so who knows where my next steps will take me: towards the soul or body?

*

– THE END –

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination, or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

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