3:29 - Chapter I

I imagined when my heart stopped for three minutes and twenty-nine seconds last year, I had died. But then I came back thanks to a strong cocktail of electric shocks and adrenaline injections and a rather loud litany of, “Live, live, live, live, live!”

That had been the surgeon, by the way, who was an emotional creature. Perhaps he said that to every patient that died on his operating table as part of his gimmick, but it had done the trick in my case. I had returned, my heart was pumping blood again and my brain began reversing its shut down process.

When I came to a couple of weeks later, I realized I had lost few things (mainly the sight and hearing on my left eye and ear) and gained a couple of other things as compensation. The old folks might now call me ‘touched’. Or ‘cursed’. My mom still called me lazy and I was forever ‘Delusional Wombat’ to my dad.   

Losing the sight in my left eye was hard to take and the loss put unnecessary strain on my right eye, so I wasn’t allowed to look at computers or LED screens for too long. That meant no smartphones that could entice me into partaking in the forbidden activity and my time in front of the computer was regulated by an egg timer.

While everybody else talked with their thumbs and other digits, I had to rely on old-fashioned face-to-face speech and passing notes in the class to communicate. My parents also had the initiative of informing the school that I needed to sit at the very front of the class due to this newfound impediment. The school happily obliged.

When I died during those precious minutes, I did not see anything. No tunnel and no light at the end of that tunnel. No horned devils or a scene from hell. No people who had passed away coming back and giving me advice. No angels, not a feather. Not a thing.

But I heard music.

A woman sang a slow, sad melody in Chinese while I died. My brain knew it was Chinese because my dad was an avid fan of martial arts movies and he made me sit through dozens of kung fu flicks.

In fact the first thing I said when I had woken up from the coma was, “It was a Chinese song!”

My parents and the doctors attributed this outburst to an affected region in my brain. They told me I would be prone to such eruptions of unknown origin from now on, but hey, things could be worse. I could be losing my ability to retain long-term memories or the damaged area could be where my toilet training habits were stored. I didn’t think my parents were prepared to teach their seventeen-year old how to wipe butt 101 for the second time.

So when few days after the initial outburst I again cried, “A bloody purple polka dot umbrella, you say? That’s awful!” they ignored me.

Perhaps they shouldn’t. Because that purple polka dot umbrella was the murder weapon in the homicide case of one Mr. Izaak Szczepanek. The killer sharpened the metal tip of the umbrella and coated it with poison from the golden dart frog. Izzy died from having his foot stabbed with the umbrella. This happened in 1976 and the poor old man had been haunting Ward 3 ever since, unable to rest. It was, I had to say, an awful way to die.

The first time I’d seen Izzy, I had been experimenting with my left eye. In those earlier days it was hard for me to accept that I was partially blind and deaf. I had closed my right eye and concentrated on the darkness ahead. Then suddenly I could see my bed, the curtain around it, and a wrinkled face staring at me with great interest. That was Izzy.

We became friends as soon as he figured out that I could only hear him if he was at my left side. His being a ghost didn’t really register with me until he told me the circumstances of his demise.

“I had never imagined that Borys would bear so much grudge because I stole his wife,” Izzy had lamented. “But an umbrella! And purple!” he said in tears. “I hate purple! I want justice! My Elise needs to know that her stupid husband murdered me in cold blood!”

Moved by Izzy’s inability to accept his absurd situation (killed by a murder weapon of the wrong color), I volunteered to inform his beloved Elise.

A quick research on the net told me that one Elise Kowalowski née Bombeck still lived in a town few hundred miles away from where I was, so I thought to write a short letter to her. However, since Izzy kept insulting my sentence composition, I let him dictate the content. The letter was only finished a week later since he wanted me to write something in Polish and I was having trouble with the alphabets. As a return address, I put the hospital’s.

Then we waited. Izzy told me a lot of stories about the other occupants of the hospital and how each had met their end. Some were shy, some were enthusiastic about talking with a live person who could actually talk back. “We haven’t seen one of you in a while!” said Mrs. Gunnar who died of a ruptured appendix (“I thought the pain was because I was pregnant again!”).

“One of…? You mean, there are people like me?” I asked her.

“Of course, dear. Let’s see, the last one was that boy from Ward 5. Five years ago, was it?”

“Ah, yes,” Izzy said. “That Eldridge boy. Quiet one, but always polite. He writes Polish better than you do.”

“Hold on,” I said. “You had him write to Elise too?”

“Of course!”

I was confused. “Then why did we write to her again?”

“Because she didn’t believe me the first time!”

It turned out that Elise didn’t believe him the second time too. My letter was returned along with a terse note from Mrs. Borys Kowalowski.

Please stop sending this prank letters. My husband and I would like nothing better than to forget about Izaak Szczpanek and the heartache he caused us. We will take legal action if you persist.

Sincerely,

PS: Your Polish has deteriorated.

When I showed the reply to Izzy, he moped and moped. Mrs. Gunnar told me he would hide in the supply closet for a month or so when he was upset. Few days later I was discharged and I had never seen him again.

So there.

Like Joni Mitchell said, I’ve looked at the world from both sides now.