Then his body literally snapped in two.
The sound it made was like a hefty bundle of dry branches breaking all at once. But there was also a wet sound, a splash. The boy died in front of our very eyes. He smashed to his death. He came down on the operating table with a thundering crash and literally bounced back up before landing again, this time for good. The plugs on his chest were pulled loose and the electrocardiograph immediately let out a shrill, continuous beep. The tent around his head collapsed, the instruments table fell over, and all the instruments crashed to the floor. And Tim . . .
All the bones in his body were broken. If I remember correctly, the autopsy report said that only three of his vertebrae and a metatarsal were spared. Everything else was simply pulverized. But his skin—human skin can withstand enormous forces without tearing. What was lying there before us in that blue hospital gown was a shapeless bag of skin, within which complete destruction had taken place. In death, people shrink. The violence of his death had colored the thing that was once Tim a deep purple and shrunk him with a shock, without spitting out its contents. That’s what the wet sound was.
Except for the skull. That looked like a lead weight had fallen on it. Skulls are full of holes, and this one had one extra sawed into it. Stefan got it all over him and screeched like a little girl.
I screamed too. The anesthetist cowered in a corner of the OR and looked like he was going to faint any second. Stella ran from the room crying and left the door wide open. That’s when we heard the siren wailing out in the corridor.
So this is what the media described as the “strange fractures” found in the bones of at least sixteen victims that night. This, too, was subject of the wildest theories, as is always the case with great mysteries that remain unsolved. Convulsions brought on by epilepsy. An aggressive infection. Arsenic poisoning. Nerve gas. Convulsions can cause bones to break, but not like this. Not anything like this.
Well, we declared him dead; that’s all we could do for him. Once I’d freed myself from that sterile OR center and was standing in the corridor, only then did it start to filter through that something much bigger was going on in the hospital. I was too rattled to react. My hands refused to stop trembling, and all I could see before me was that boy’s smile. It didn’t fully register, but I heard the wailing of the alarm, the screaming, the running feet, and the constantly repeated, ominous message over the intercom: “. . . not yet contained. I repeat, not yet contained. Patients and staff are requested to remain in place unless otherwise instructed by qualified personnel. It is strictly forbidden to leave the hospital premises. First aid personnel to Unit 2A right away, I repeat . . .” But the hallway in front of the OR center was eerily deserted. I rushed into the first ladies’ room I could find.
And that’s where it happened. I felt it immediately when the automatic lights came on and I smelled chlorine and disinfectants. The atmosphere in here was charged, seemed to crackle with energy. I saw it with more than my eyes; it was deep within my brain, because this time—I know that now—I was the possessed. The walls expanded and spun around me. For a second, I thought I was going to faint, because I mistook the rising of the wind for dizziness in my vestibular system. I was already bracing myself. Then I noticed the cold mass of air that was menacingly pushing forward, pregnant with—and this is true—large snowflakes. The mirrors fogged up in a frozen bouquet of ice flowers. High above the suspended ceiling I saw electromagnetic sparks, as if the bitterly cold air was charged, and the black flashes of birds tumbling and diving in a rapid, spiraling descent. A storm was coming. I steadied myself on the sinks and stumbled back into the corridor.
There was someone there.
At the end of the hallway. There was a deep void. An immense darkness.
I saw a shadow between drifts of snow that were now rushing through the hall in front of the OR center, a shadow without a face. Where it came from I do not know, but I knew one thing more certain than anything else: that shadow had caused all of this.
Then I started to fall.
I fell with sickening speed through merciless winds. I barely knew what was happening to me. Suddenly the ground under my feet had disappeared. I flailed my arms, looking for something to hold on to, while gravity took possession of me. The cold and the wind slammed the air out of my lungs, tensed up my heart and caused my scream to die away above me. My intestines protested against the velocity of my fall. I know that skydivers can relax their bodies while free-falling, but I couldn’t. My fall was uncontrolled, a disorderly and dizzying descent through a degenerate darkness, and the feeling it produced in me was a degree of intolerable horror.
And it wouldn’t stop.
The only thing you can think about when you’re falling from a great height is the ground, which you will hit any second now, and the only impulse is to brace yourself against the impact that will crush the life out of you. But it didn’t come. I kept on falling. The extension of death was not a source of solace; it did nothing to remove my piercing fear of it, nor did it relieve the suffocating pressure on my lungs. On the contrary. The storm through which I was falling prolonged my demise into hopeless, endless agony. Awaiting me down there lay infinity.
Weeks and years went by, and I fell.
The manifestation of infinity is beyond our comprehension and that is, I daresay, the salvation of our sanity. But I’ve seen it. I was offered such a perspective—and one look at the place our pathetic, individual lives occupy within it, instantly made me want to hit the ground.
But slowly an even more suffocating, more alarming fear dawned on me: that this was not going to happen.
I realized that I was awake only after staring for a long time at my hand. It was lying flat on the linoleum floor of the hallway. My cheek too. Something painful in my body was throbbing (I would later find out I had a rib contusion and bruises all over my arms). Minutes went by before I understood where I was. The siren and the intercom had fallen still. I had no idea how long I had been unconscious.
I tried calling for help but discovered I had no voice. The fall had ripped it out of me. So I knew that it had really happened. Nevertheless, here I was, and the storm had blown over.
But that was the biggest illusion of all, I now know. Because the storm had never really died down. Twice, I have made the mistake of thinking I was free of it, but it keeps coming back worse every time.
It follows me day and night.
Every time it attacks me, this is how it happens.
I fall through the pitch-black void and experience infinity. Hell is repetition, they say, but being trapped in infinity over and over again is the everlasting destruction of the soul.