The first thing Arnie was conscious of was the sound of the machines. Then he realized that he was looking down on a hospital bed, and on that bed lay a man, and that man was him.
Arnie exclaimed in horror, but the doctors in the room ignored him, as if he wasn’t there. He wasn’t there because he was on the bed. He couldn’t be in two places at one time, unless…
“You’re not dead,” said a voice. “You’re just in a coma.”
“What? Who’s that? Who’s there?” asked Arnie, looking around.
“It’s me. I mean it’s you. I’m your subconscious,” said the voice, which he realized was coming from inside his head. “Don’t you remember? You were in an automobile accident.”
Arnie did remember – the bus coming out of nowhere, the sound of the collision, and the acute pain in his head. “So I’m not dead,” he said, trying to absorb this new reality.
“No, not dead. You’re just out of your body while you recover. You can go anywhere. Where do you want to be?”
“I want to be with Imelda,” said Arnie. Imelda was his wife of three years and the love of his life. He’d never expected to find love at his advanced age. And then he’d met Imelda. She was twenty years younger than him, but that hadn’t stopped her from falling in love with him.
She must be here somewhere.He tried to look around the room but was soon spinning out of control.
“Careful,” said his subconscious. “You’re not in a physical body now. You have to move more slowly.”
Arnie tried again, and again. It took him a while but he soon adapted to his new form and even his capacity to move through solid objects. He realized that if he wanted to go somewhere, he just had to think about it, and a moment later, he would find himself there. He moved through the hospital, from his room to the corridor to the cafeteria but found no trace of his wife. It must be too difficult for her to see him like this, lying on a bed in a coma. She was probably at home, in a terrible state.
He thought about home, the multi-million-dollar mansion he’d worked all of his life to afford, working his way up from an office administrator to the CEO of a major corporation. And the next thing, he found himself there, passing through the front door.
He heard his wife before he saw her, crying in another room. He passed through into the kitchen and found her there with their neighbour Jake, who had his arm around her, trying to console her. Arnie was grateful to Jake, but wished that he could console her, too. Tell her that he was going to be okay.
“Let’s hope he never wakes up,” said Imelda, and Arnie realized to his horror that she was talking about him, that she wasn’t crying but laughing. “The old codger’s lawyer had me sign a prenup, so if I leave him, I get nothing,” she told Jake. “I thought I’d have to wait another ten years or more for him to die, so we could be together, but that bus intervened. Divine intervention.”
She was laughing again when Arnie suddenly found himself back in the hospital room.
“I can’t believe it,” he said, devastated. “I thought she really loved me.”
“And you can still think that,” said the voice of his subconscious, “if you want to.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re waking up,” said the voice, and Arnie saw that the body in the bed, his body, was starting to move. “You have to make a decision. You can decide to remember or to forget what you’ve discovered.”
“Red pill or blue pill,” said Arnie, remembering the film The Matrix, in which the protagonist has to choose between taking the red pill and discovering the difficult truth, or the blue pill and remaining in comfortable ignorance. He imagined the life he would have if he took the red pill, the imminent pain, separation and solitude.
“Blue pill,” he said, but immediately regretted his decision. But it was too late. He was waking up.
“Where’s Imelda?” were his first words, on returning to consciousness, and a few hours later, she was there, looking devastated.
“It’s okay,” he reassured her, again and again, but she seemed to find it more difficult to recover from his accident than he did.
A few weeks later, he was back in the office, but he wasn’t happy, because his wife wasn’t happy. Perhaps, he thought, his accident had made her realize that he could die at any moment, that their time together was limited because of his advanced age, and perhaps she had begun to resent all the time he spent working instead of with her. He had told her that he’d be in a conference all evening, but he decided to surprise her instead. He stopped off at a flower shop on the way home. Normally, he bought his wife blue violets, which she loved, but this time, he decided to buy her red roses. They were more romantic.
As he entered the house, Arnie heard their neighbour Jake upstairs. He must be helping Imelda with something. Arnie went upstairs, anticipating the look of surprise on her face.