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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781456733575 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AuthorHouse |
| Publication date: | 02/15/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 377 KB |
Read an Excerpt
No Way Home
By Richard Boswell
AuthorHouse
Copyright © 2011 Richard BoswellAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4567-3356-8
Chapter One
No Way Home
Perhaps I have forgotten more than I care to remember. Looking back now, it seems my life was a mixed platter of consequences and happenchance. Where I was going often depended on where I came from. For some, it is just a matter of coincidence; they accept what comes to them and then try to work people and events to their benefit. For others it is a matter of fate, some great power created all things and portions out their share, both good and evil. For others it is Karma, do good and get good back, do evil and get evil back. But for me, it was a matter of God; my God, my culture, my hopes.
It was a little after midnight and I was riding home. Home, what a funny word, I had been kicked out of my home of fifteen years by my wife and was staying with a friend in a back room of his trailer in the southeast part of town. It was the twelfth day of February and the temperature was just below freezing. I had bought a Yamaha 850 Midnight Special motorcycle from a friend at work only a few weeks before. It was a little cold riding but I loved the freedom and openness that the bike gave me. I was south bound on State Street and just coming up to 39th south. I looked up and I saw the light change green, so I gave it a little more gas. The bike accelerated instantly and I lunged forward. As I cleared the intersection, I looked down the road about a quarter of a block and saw a van cross the cement medium and come into my lane. He was traveling really fast so I leaned hard to the right to avoid hitting him. The gut wrenching horror of the crunch, reached my ears without an internal realization of what had just happened, sort of like I was listening to song a on the radio. In slow motion the bike and I sailed in the air. I clung to the handlebars as though they would somehow save me. I saw a steel light pole coming at me and instinctively I turned the handlebars and leaned. A useless effort, I was in the air. The bike and I struck the pole with a finality that punctured my sole. We slid down to the ground and I lay under the motorcycle looking at my body. My leg had been torn open in a jagged rupture which was about six inches long and four wide. I was bleeding profusely. My chest and stomach were also torn open and my intestines were exposed, lying out on my stomach and draped over my leg and onto the ground.
"I am a dead man," I said to myself. I tried to reach my leg to cover it and stop the bleeding wound. It was a useless effort, I couldn't reach down. I had extreme pain in my shoulder. The pain had immediately radiated from my leg to my stomach, from my stomach to my shoulder and then to my head. My helmet was cracked and the plastic view shield was gone. I could feel my breathing and heart racing. It is strange to listen to one's own breath and wonder when it will stop. At that moment, I looked up and saw the van driver step out of the dented vehicle and stagger toward me. The son of a bitch is drunk, I thought. Great, just great, I've been killed by a drunk.
My body was fading; I could feel myself slipping away. I was bleeding out. Looking at my left leg I could see the blood pulsating, coming out in squirts. I knew I had a severed artery. I tried to roll over hoping to stop the pain. As I did, I saw red lights coming toward me. I wondered how the heck an ambulance could have been called let alone gotten here so fast. Perhaps I was just dreaming, or hallucinating. I closed my eyes and then reopened them to try and verify my vision. In an instant a Paramedic was over me and putting a breather mask on my face. As he pulled off the helmet, which came off in two pieces, he turned to his companion and said
"This guy won't make it to the hospital, he's bleeding out."
I remember the ride to the hospital. It seemed like an eternity. I went in and out of consciousness several times. One of the two Para-meds in the back said;
"This is the worst case I've ever seen! This guy's blood is almost clear!"
As I went through the Emergency doors, I again passed out. I awoke in the operating room. The doctor had not given me any anesthetic because he was afraid it might kill me due to my low blood and shock. The overhead lights blinded me and the pain was unbearable. I closed my eyes again. Suddenly, I felt my heart stop. Then my breath stopped. I wasn't afraid; I figured the doctor would re-start them.
"This man is dead," the doctor said, "Time of death, 0210 hrs. Take him down to the morgue."
Who was he talking about? I thought, not me! I heard him unplugging the IV's and throwing the instruments into a pan. I heard the rustle of the sheet being pulled over my face. I tried to open my eyes and tell them that I was not dead, but I could not. My eyes didn't work. I tried to move and pull the sheet off my fact and could not. For some strange reason, I could still hear, but everything else had shut down. I heard the gurney wheels clacking on the floor as I was being wheeled to the elevator to go down to the morgue, which was in the basement of the hospital. The sheet must have slipped off because the first nurse made a rude comment about my male body parts and the second one laughed. What is happening? I thought. Something is wrong, I'm still alive! I can't be going to the morgue. I'm not done living! My thoughts raced. I heard the elevator door open. The gurney began again to roll again. I heard the morgue doors open. It must have been a button control door, because I heard a hit and then the doors opening. I began to pray. My prayer was not more fervent than those before, rather it was questioning, why are you taking me? Must I die? I became afraid. It was one of the only times in my life when I experienced real fear. I was floating in a vacuum of blackness. There was no dimension and no self orientation, just blackness. It's now or never, I thought. I concentrated all my energy, all the energy of my life, of my sole, of my being, into my right leg. I raised my leg up off the gurney.
"He moved his leg!" the first nurse screamed.
"That's just post-mortal spasm." The second one said sarcastically.
"No, he moved it up slowly. I'm gonna go get the doctor."
I could hear her run out of the room. The other nurse cursed a couple of times and walked away from the gurney. I began to pray again.
I have read about people who die. They see light or float above their bodies or hear voices or see deceased relatives or friends. Not for me, for me it was black. Not the blackness of night, no, but a deeper blackness, a total blackness. Like the blackness in a cave when they turn out the lights but worse. My blackness seemed void of dimension. It was as though I was floating is space without any stars or light or anything but a complete emptiness. Perhaps I had gone to hell. I continued to pray. My fear was increasing. My years of hope for the existence of life after death were diminishing. And where was the damn doctor? Then, in the silent emptiness of blackness, in the moment when I was about to abandon my faith, my hopes and all that I had believed in and sink into an eternal nothingness, I heard a voice; "You may choose" spoken only once and only in my very frightened mind, but clear as the morning light, clear as a mountain stream, I heard the voice. With all the strength I had accumulated in my entire life, with all the energy I had stored in my brain, with all the diminishing faith that was left, I concentrated on my heart. The thump shook my body. Almost simultaneously the doctor put his stethoscope onto my chest.
"Damn it. This man is still alive. He's going to be a veg., he's been dead for, probably, ten minutes," the doctor said in a voice of serious disappointment rather than concern or excitement because I was still alive. I took my first breath. I could hear the blood gurgling in my throat as I sucked in new air. It was not like holding your breath where you have the great urge to breathe until you must breathe. No, I had lost the urge to breathe, all that had left me; I just instinctively took a breath. I then opened my eyes and said in a gurgled voice,
"I'm all right Doctor."
The doctor staggered back and looked really surprised. "Get him back into surgery!" He almost shouted.
Chapter Two
Inevitable
I opened my eyes again. Across the room was sitting my estranged wife.
"Where am I?" I asked.
"You're in the Saint Marks hospital. You're in your room. You died twice during surgery and have been comatose for three days," she answered.
"Thank you for coming," I said fishing for motive.
"The doctor said you lost a lot of blood. He wasn't sure if you'd remember me, he said your brain was swollen. Some of it came up black on the CAT scan," she said.
I was about to answer when the door became clouded by the silhouette of a Doctor. As I looked his way I could see that I was in a very complex bed. My left leg was up in a sling and was wrapped and bandaged from my hip to my toe. My left shoulder was in a cast which restricted the movement of my arm. My head was stabilized, strapped down and turned slightly to the right toward where my wife was sitting. There were cables and weights hanging from both my legs to a pulley. I felt a million pangs of pain.
"Do you know who I am?" the doctor asked.
"Yes, you're the doctor, I don't know your name," I answered.
"Do you know what day it is?"
"No", I said.
"Who's the president of the United States?"
"I think it's Regan," I said wondering why the stupid questions.
"We're going to run some tests on you. You also are going to need at least five more surgeries. How do you feel?" he asked.
"I'm hurting," I said.
"You have a morphine drip going into your IV. With your right hand you just need to press this button and you'll get some morphine."
With that the doctor turned and looked at my wife and said something too low for me to hear and left. Elna stood and walked over to the bed.
"The doctor says you'll be in here for a long time. I'll bring the kids and come and visit you as much as I can."
She then turned, reached into her purse and pulled out a small stack of papers.
"These are for you. I'm divorcing you, Robert. I thought we might be able to get back together, but now that you are so injured and so unable to provide for me..... well, I just don't think I have the patience to push you around in a wheel chair and tend our kids and work for money ... Sorry it had to end like this."
With that she turned and left. It seemed cold to me, but we had been separated for three or four months before the accident and she must have had a lot of worries on how she was going to feed the kids and pay the mortgage. Still, I loved her and she once said she loved me. I lay there and looked at the ceiling. It was mostly thinking, reviewing my life and my relationship with her.
My mind began to drift back to Chicago. I had worked as a US Border Patrol Agent for four years in San Clemente, California and had been promoted to Criminal Investigator in June of that fourth year and transferred to Chicago.
I closed my eyes to think and relax. My thoughts took me back to an earlier time, far back, to a time I had almost forgotten; to a time when I was a different person, living a different life, in a different world.
Chapter Three
CHICAGO
All of my dreams had come true. I had served as a United States Border Patrol Agent in San Clemente, California and had gotten a promotion to Criminal Investigator. The assignment was in Chicago, Illinois. So there I was reporting for duty. What a thrill. I was an Investigator for the United States Department of Justice. What an honor! Chicago was great. The federal building was on Dearborn Ave and we were on the seventh floor. I got out of the Cab, and took the elevator up. After I met with the other investigators, and got my badge and first assignment, I was briefed on the training program. Training was going to be each Thursday. I was assigned a training officer. There was homework and in six months I'd be sent to another academy. I loved it. All my life I had wanted to be a Federal Investigator. Here I was with my dream in hand.
Weeks and months flew by. I was doing several cases a week and after completing more than a dozen cases successfully, was mostly let go to work on my own. We were short handed and I'd get sent out with the training officer only a couple times a month. I'd completed the Department of Justice study course in a little over four months. The course usually takes at minimum one year and often Agents don't finish it for two or more years. My supervisor was surprised and impressed, so as time went by I was let go more and more often without any supervision. The Department had given me a room, a sort-of office, with seven filing cabinets in it, in which there were more than thirty thousand cases. The supervisor had taken me into the eight by six foot room and said, "Here is your office, and there are your cases. Do as many as you can as fast as you can. Most of them are already a couple of years old. The Office had an old IBM typewriter, a phone, a small desk, and no window.
I gladly took out the first thirteen cases, made a plan, and went out and worked them. In a week I had finished twelve of the thirteen and had sent them in for adjudication, deportation or trial. One of the first cases I did was a medical Doctor who had come from Poland. He had set up an office in West Chicago and had practiced as a General Practitioner for about seven years. He had entered the United States on a B-2 visa which is for tourists but he had no intention of touring, instead, he opened up his medical practice and stayed. He had of course, changed his name and was serving only the Polish community. So he never had anyone report him or look to see if his license was posted. He did his prescriptions through a pharmacy which knew him and kept records of the prescriptions. The pharmacy could easily claim that he had given them his license number and they never checked it. So he remained undetected for seven years. For those seven years, the I&NS was so very far behind that they were only doing critical cases, cases where the alien was a felon or a danger to society. I had however, been given this huge pile of cases, mostly benign, to finish up. I arrested the Doctor without incident and took him back to the holding cell in the Federal Building. I interrogated him and he readily admitted to coming to the United States with the intent to work. He justified himself by saying that there were no local physicians who knew his people, could speak their language and could adequately meet their medical needs.
While I was in my office finishing the paperwork, the senior investigator came in and read my report and then did something which surprised me. He called in IRS. The tax people came down from the ninth floor and talked with the Doctor for about an hour. I was excluded from the room so I'm not sure what they talked about, but it had to be money, or his income or holdings or something of that matter. What else is the IRS interested in? At last they called me in and I was then instructed by the interrogating agent to accompany the Doctor to the bank and his home where he would withdraw all his funds and collect whatever things he could carry from his home and return with him. I did as I was instructed. I thought it was good of them to let him get his belongings and money. Probably a professional courtesy, after all he was a Doctor and was helping his people.
It was about nine in the evening when I got back. I expected to put him a holding cell and call the IRS people in the morning. But two of them were there waiting for me. They sat down with the doctor and took all his money, every penny. He was then told that they would purchase a one way ticket for him back to Poland and that after he arrived he could file a claim against the IRS to recover whatever money wasn't owed the United States. He strongly objected. He called us Nazis and said he had earned his money, which was more than two hundred thousand dollars, and that he had paid his taxes each year. He said we were thieves and rats and demanded to have an attorney present. This right he was summarily denied. They said he didn't have the same constitutional rights as US citizens because he was an illegal alien so the constitutional laws did not apply to him. He was put in one of the holding cells alone. The next morning he was taken to the airport and sent back to Poland. Wow, I was surprised. I thought it a little unjust but the IRS guys assured me that he'd get his money back when he filed from Poland. I didn't believe them. There were no US IRS forms in Poland, and if he did manage to send them in, I suspect he wouldn't get an answer.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from No Way Home by Richard Boswell Copyright © 2011 by Richard Boswell. Excerpted by permission of AuthorHouse. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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