Healing Rain
The worst thing about fatal sickness is that it kills your mind long before your body. That and the whole writhing in agony part.
It bites and bites, stripping away all that is your basic humanity until you are reduced to just the basics of humanity. Sure, you breathe, you shit, you pee, you caugh.
But all the other things, all the parts of you that remembers those days when you could really and truly feel there was something more to the self than basic chemical and biological functions. Well, those days are gone.
You bleed them through your sweat.
You respire them through those painful, heaving coughs that leave you just too fucking exhausted to even turn in the bed, to raw and bloody and defeated to even open your eyes. The bed you have stayed in for so long you feel it has become a part of you. Like a third, freakish leg.
Just another handicap.
Just another pittiful little ugliness.
At first you feel yourself dwindle and wither, feel the muscles that used to carry you to the tallest places, that could plunge you to the lowest, that could support you in walking, dancing, making love, making dinner.
All those muscles die away.
Tiny, tiny implosions in your body. Like the seconds.
And then, time passes, and you don’t feel the person you used to be any longer, you’ve forgotten, and you don’t feel the memories. Only vaguely, like the fever-induced hallucinations, or that familiar, sweet and bitter hole that the painkillers dig for you.
And then you stop noticing that you are dying.
And at that prescise moment.
You are really dead.
It is irony, that whole thing with the rain. And I cried when I learned the truth of it, cried like I have never cried before. It hurts to cry when you are sick. Your whole body is propelled into a spasm-hell that justifies those long, long, long hours of staying perfectly still because you fear the pain of moving, of turning your head, of even opening your eyes.
And that is what I am.
Immobile.
Nothing.
I have made peace with it. I had to. They don’t let you die here. I have tried to die. I have tried so bad. Irony served me a sardonic blow here as well. Too good health, they tell me. So you will last long.
Lucky me.
Lucky me.
I had to make peace with being nothing. With not being able to move. With not being able to walk. With having to endure someone putting a pipe inside me that drains the piss away. With having to endure someone washing me with an indifferent swamp, suddenly trembling because I remember washing my daughter this way, with washing lovers this way, with washing the kitchen in this way.
I won’t let my daughter come here.
I wouldn’t be able to bear it.
It’s been years.
I watched the rain when it fell. It was around noon, I remember, because I was waiting for my bath. When you only lie completely still, you have these completely trivial, boring things as major landmarks in your life. Eating. The night shows on TV. Bathing.
The rain came out of nowhere. It came suddenly and violently. I remember being astounded, because such things don’t normally happen. Rain doesn’t spontanously compose. I mean, its just water, and water doesn’t come from nowhere.
From a blue sky amazing clouds billowed and formed, gathering and coagulating in a wild dance that took my breath away, swirling and dancing and moving like a wild, wild flock of gray swans.
And then the rain came.
There was something strange about it. Even I could tell from my bed through the window, locked and gagged. There was a luster, a gleam, a strange whitness to the rain of purity that vanished from the eyes if focused upon. Shivers developed on my body, my pale, skeletal, sick body. I started shaking slightly.
The fine hairs rose in awe.
And just as suddenly that the rain had started, it vanished.
The clouds evaporated.
And there was only the sun.
The hysteria started moments after the rain had ended. I heard it in the halls. And it lasted, and lasted, and lasted. I wanted dearly to know what was going on, and I tried to move, a thing I had long learned to despise and not even try. But the sounds and the laughter and even crying commenced, and it lasted. And even though I knew it would cost me dearly, I sat up on the bed, stiffling the growing spasmatic coughs, coming to my legs in a way I had not stepped on them for ages, feeling unfamiliar nerves awokened in the feet, and I, and to this day I don’t know how I manged, dragged myself to the hall.
There was a swirl of people, and I gasped, and someone came over to me and said, excited:” I was outside, in the rain, and the water fell on me, and something happened inside me, inside. And now I feel completely and utterly well.”
It was only later that I recognized the voice of Mrs. Stragazzito, the woman who had liver-cancer. A few days later, tests confirmed that, yes, she was for all matters and purposes completely healthy.
This happened to almost all the other patients who were outside in the rain. The rain washed their sickness and ailments and illnesses away, drained it off them, freed their souls of this anguish.
Cancer, HIV down to only genital warts.
All vanished.
Just like that.
It was all over the news, but no one could explain it. I know, because I watched every talk show and every news broadcast with fervent fascination.
And each time there was an interview with someone from the hospital who had been freed,who had been cured, and each time there were pictures of people I had know for years who had been lying in agony and pain running around, a part of me I didn’t know had been salvaged from the sickness died.
And I experienced a whole new kind of death.
