Million Dollar Eyes

It turned out to be July 17th, a Monday. There was nothing strikingly important going on. An old woman was stabbed to death for her pocketbook, a young thug shot up a bodega, a drunk driver fatally wounded a little girl, another priest in a molestation trial, another celebrity in trouble with the law and getting off with a slap on the wrist, the homeless were hungry, the poor were angry, the rich were getting richer, President Bush was about to invade another country for nuclear weapons they most likely didn’t have. There was nothing about a man being missing for nine days, nothing to help him link himself to something more than confusion. His mind stopped racing for a second and he fell asleep for over an hour. The patient was awakened by the sound of his room door closing with a loud bang. He sat up and studied the room. Next to him on the bedside table was a bottle of painkillers and a hospital key card. He stood up, put his hand to his throbbing head, and decided to make a break for it. He opened the door and inspected the ward. First thing was first; he had to find a way out of the blood caked clothes. Two minutes on the street would garner more attention than he felt like dealing with. He thought the floor seemed unusually quiet for a Monday afternoon. The hallway was lit up with bright lights hanging overhead—the unnatural kind. About ten feet to his left was a long obtrusive desk, cluttered with papers and bins. He could see only one woman sitting there manning the phone. The less he was noticed the better. His nerves started to tingle at their ends, and he made his way down the hall. He kept on moving, stopping to peer into different door windows. There was an old man on a respirator in one. The ball in his oxygen machine slowly moved up, then down. His frail decrepit body looked two days away from being a ghost. Maybe the angels would surround him and take him to a spacious cloud swarming with bright happiness. Or maybe when that final beep rang out he would be ravaged by the minions of hell, with their protruding horns, razor sharp teeth, incessantly gnawing at his unforgiving flesh while he grasped into the air of nothingness, begging for salvation. Two doors down was a room filled with people. They were all standing around the bed hugging each other. He could see that most of the women held tissues in at least one of their hands. They all had dark skin and wavy black hair. One woman started wailing in between long drawn out sobs. She was saying something in Spanish while the rest of the family kept trying to calm her down. Straining to make out who was in the bed, a peculiar sadness swept over him. It was a young girl. She couldn’t have been more then twenty, laying there prone and dying. There were all sorts of wires from man-made machines hooked up to her chest. There was a breathing tube connected to her mouth and her face looked as if it had been stung by a thousand tiny bees. The air from beneath the door gave off a putrid scent and started to turn his stomach. The world was falling apart at the seams and nobody seemed to care.