What’s Left?

Silver met black, and his arm ignited for an instant.

He felt each tiny nerve in his arm light on fire, felt them fry and fizzle out of existence. He felt his muscles seize and his brain stop working for a split second as it tried to deal with the overload of electricity, heard the sounds of sparks flying and saw the lights sparkling before his eyes and memories of 4th of July parties flashed through his mind. He felt individual fibers of carpet against his skin, the matted strings where he’d spilt a can of pop last June—June 28th, he remembered. A calendar flashed before his eyes with a big, red circle around one of the days.

Then it was over, all in a split second, and he saw black.

He felt the world shift out from underneath him, and suddenly he was spinning in a field of light. Prisms of light shot through him and reflected off glass chandeliers into his eyes. He saw images of a whiteboard that was not his own with handwriting that was unfamiliar to him, and symptoms blurred when he tried to read them. He was curious, but he knew it didn’t matter much anyways. Maybe the symptoms didn’t matter here. Maybe all that mattered here was...

Star Wars.

John Lennon.

Sunday afternoons playing baseball in the park.

But it spun again, the whiteboard falling over and landing on the floor. He saw photographs of two men and a woman staring at it, and then flames burned the color from them until it went white. White, and then the camera panned out to show a capped test tube containing a rusted battery. It was crackled and oozing something yellow, and he blinked. It came closer, and he saw hands reaching to spin it around to read the label on the side. It was a test, being tested for something. But the hands slipped. Glass shattered on the floor and the battery broke into a hundred pieces. He would never know why it was here in the lab, which gels were about to be run on it. But it didn’t seem important. Maybe tests didn’t matter here. Maybe all that mattered here was...

Monster truck shows.

James Bond marathons.

Jamming out to a guitar that took you ten years to learn.

A yellow broom swept up the glass and left a clean floor. Linoleum splattered with blues and greens and marbled with white, bought because it hid stains well, sat before him. He stared down at it. The dots began to move, began to swirl into a great whirlpool of color like nothing he knew. White flashed in his eyes like a strobe light, and he saw a man standing over a patient, a team of surgeons and nurses around him. In flashes of black, he saw them cut and sew and twist. They were fixing. It wasn’t their job to diagnose, to be right or wrong, and that was good. It felt good. Maybe figuring things out didn’t matter here. Maybe all that mattered here was...

The smell of fresh-cut grass.

Running through the night-lit city.

A child’s smile.

But the scene exploded before his eyes, leaving nothing but blackness. Black. Black slowly running into pink and purple and gold, dark turning into day as the sun rose and reflected in an iris. Someone was watching the sun rise, staring bolding into the harsh rays of the sun without blinking. The light seared through the window and split into a thousand tiny rays, and then he was flying. Soaring above the world, breaking through clouds and dancing around mountain tops. Soaring through a sky so vivid and bright. And he laughed.

Because nothing mattered here.

And then he fell.

He plunged back down to earth, the ground coming up to him too fast to comprehend. He felt afraid for the first time. Fear rocketed through his veins, but when he tried to scream there was no noise. A deafening roar drowned out his scream, the sound of his own heart beating, the feeling of bliss. He felt it all go away, being ripped out of his body like someone had torn out his heart, and he wanted to stop falling. The ground was coming closer and it hurt, the world around him was dizzy and he felt sick and it was coming so close he could see people that looked like ants and a large building and then—

Black.

A faint beeping sound.

The sound of steady breathing.

“You’re an idiot,” he heard, and then he opened his eyes.

He saw Wilson standing there in a green shirt, hair impeccable and his face transparently concerned. His mouth worked and said something, whatever came to mind first, but he could not take his eyes off of Wilson. Something was pulling him, making him stare and feel as if he would die if his eyes looked away, even for a second. Another level of his mind was having a conversation with Wilson, but he could care less what he was saying. Wilson stepped into the light and it hit his hair, and he saw shattered glass. It sparkled on the wall, refracting light every which way, and he thought that maybe logic didn’t matter here. Maybe no one here cared about things like reason. Maybe all that mattered here was...

“I love you.”