Chapter 1: Encounter

When you go bankrupt, events occur slowly, then all at once. My business had been slowly losing money for the last three fiscal quarters, but then in two weeks, the market shifted and the investors stepped in and closed the doors. In my personal life, my wife left me and I was slowly dying from a newly-diagnosed cancer, but then I was impaled and died.

So that happened.

Every summer my old college friends and I go on an adventure. We’ve done this annually since we graduated, for the last 17 years now (1999). In 1974 we’d gone skydiving in Kansas. In 1982 we went scuba diving in Bermuda. In 1988 we’d taken a performance-car driving school in Southern California. Our wives all know that every year we will be gone for a week or two, usually in late spring. Occasionally, one of us cannot make it. Our numbers have grown fewer through the years. Some have found the calls of business and family greater that getting together with college buddies. In 1986, we lost one of our friends to a drunk driver (which prompted the driving school.) But as the years have passed, the annual adventure has become a fixed event of our lives.

In 1999 the spring event came as a godsend for me.

That spring, bill collectors, process servers, and lawyers were hounding me. Every one of those fucking sharks was anxious to the first bite of me before the other sharks bit off what they wanted. I was sinking, floundering beneath the fiscal waves.

I had been a tech golden boy. I lunched with Gates, Jobs, and Ellison. I was featured in San Francisco Bay-area lifestyle magazines. My wife Denise and I were having really great sex. Then the downturn came.

After three years of sacrificing my sweat and blood, late nights and weekends, and every penny I owned or could borrow (and, finally, my marriage), my startup technology company was tanking. Though we had a stellar business plan, created an industry-changing product, and had met all our development milestones, the sector of the market we were targeting for sales was slumping very badly. Our customers were slowly going broke and so not buying our product. We didn’t know it then, but this was the gust front of the “dot com” storm that came at the end of the 1990s.

I had quit answering my phone, only glanced at the daily mail, and avoided entering and leaving the office through the front lobby. I know I was just avoiding the inevitable, but I was trying to convince myself that if I could just hold out for another 45-to-90 days, I could turn my company’s finances around. MetrixScale, my technology startup company, my baby, my brainchild, the company that was going to make me the next Gates, Jobs, and Bezos wrapped into one, was failing.

Meanwhile, after three years of seeing me only a couple of hours every week, my wife Denise had had enough. A process server delivered the divorce papers to me while I was in a meeting with some skeptical venture capitalists, trying to raise another round of funding to save my company. It pretty much ends one of those meetings when you are served legal papers right in the middle of your pitch. Ah, what the hell, the moneymen weren’t buying my line of bullshit anyway. Three years earlier I had known that I was going to be the next tech billionaire, and I had sunk everything, and I do mean everything, into the business. Worse, I had signed personal guarantees on much of the initial debt.

The cherry on the top of this crap sundae was my cancer diagnosis. I had been having recurring pain in my groin and finally went to my doctor. He insisted on a battery of tests. There were several blood tests that showed markers for cancer. He scheduled time on the hospital’s MRI the following week. I had a week of sleepless nights on top of the prospect of losing some very close and personal private parts; I had a few weeks to decide what course of treatment I would pursue. They all looked bad to me.

In the middle of this, my buddies, knowing my situation, FedEx-ed an airline ticket to me. So I scheduled a few days off, tapped into some holdout money, and packed a bag.

So, while I wasn’t yet dying, I was headed for a messy divorce and a messier bankruptcy and cancer for a perfectly awful rest of my life. Though I wanted to stay home and sulk, my buddies dragged my sorry ass along, covering most of my costs for the trip.

That year we were spelunking in the lava tubes in Washington State. I must admit that it felt good to get out of the office where I had been spending 18 hours a day for the last seven weeks. The blue skies and fresh air seemed to blow out the grunge from my soul as we checked each other’s equipment and, following our guide, headed into the lava tube.

Two days into our caving experience, we were crawling through some tight tunnels (tightest to me, who had packed on a few extra pounds in the last few months) with me bringing up the rear. We all felt, more than heard, a rumble and I felt the tunnel floor beneath me give way. Time seemed to move in slow motion as I fell. I saw the light of my headlamp refracted off ten thousand crystals, like being inside a Faberge egg. Then, nothing.

I woke up in a hospital recovery room to the beep of heart monitors. A competent, plain-faced nurse came in and checked my vitals then called a doctor. The doctor let me know that it was a near thing, but that I had survived a close brush with death. Did I remember anything?

I said that I remembered falling into a crystalline chamber, and then floating in a formless space. No body, nothing to see, just ... grayness. At first it was frightening, but after an unknown, unknowable time it became calming and tranquil.

The doctor scribbled as I spoke, not giving me a clue what he thought my memories meant. When I pressed him, he gave a small, guarded smile and said, “Well, it’s a different story than floating down a tunnel into a Great Light.” He told me to rest and said that I was recovering with amazing quickness. The nurse injected something into my I.V. line and I relaxed and promptly fell asleep.

I woke in a regular hospital room. I guess my company’s high-cost medical insurance was finally paying off. The sun shone in on a few small flower arrangements. Aside from the soreness I felt in my abdomen, I enjoyed the experience of the clean, warm blankets and no demands. There might be a legion of bill collectors in the lobby, but behind the wall of the hospital’s bureaucracy, I was feeling safe and cozy. I peered at the tags on the flowers. A foot-high ficus was from some of my college buddies and a small African violet was from the group of people with whom I had worked at my troubled company. They must have spent all of $10, but at least they remembered. Hell, I didn’t blame them. We were all pinched for cash as the company had trouble meeting payroll.

A nurse came in and calmly did nurse tasks, taking my temperature and blood pressure, checking my dressings from surgery. She was middle-aged, with threads of gray in her brunette hair. I could see that just a few years earlier, she had been a real babe. I asked for help to use the toilet, but she told me her orders were to keep me in bed until the doctor came by on his rounds and okayed it. I had to use a bedpan, so my relief came at the price of my pride.

When the doctor showed up, he reviewed my chart while asking me how I felt. When he had heard that I had had a bowel movement, he acted like he was going to put a gold star on my chart. I had made a poopy! Apparently, bowel function after abdominal surgery is a big milestone. It turned out that a great deal of my surgery took place close to the spinal column. The doctor pulled back the blanket from the foot of the bed and tickled my toes and scraped the sole of my foot with an instrument. He had me flex my toes and lift my legs. Everything seemed to work. More gold stars.

Next, he looked me square in the eyes and his voice turned serious. I felt a stab of fear at what he was going to say next. After all the good news, was there going to some bad news?

“Before your surgery, I reviewed your medical records, Mr. Devlin, and I saw your unfortunate diagnosis, including your MRIs. My surgical team consulted with your primary physician and your oncologist. I am happy to tell you that when we had you open, we had a look around. We took lots of samples and sent them to the lab. Congratulations, Mr. Devlin, you are cancer-free.”

I felt light-headed. I had pretended to ignore the prospect of what the cancer diagnosis meant, but hearing those words, I felt like the man in the electric chair hearing that the phone call in the next room was the Governor pardoning him.

I asked about the false positives on the tests. He seemed uncomfortable at criticizing another doctor and asked me to talk to them about the misleading tests. “But I can assure you that we found no trace of cancer.”

I asked about my injuries.

The doctor explained, “Mr. Devlin, you fell into the world’s largest geode. You know one of those rocks that, when you crack it open, it’s filled with crystals? Your fall caused you to be transfixed on a large crystal at the base of the inner chamber. This penetration caused a great deal of damage to your internal organs. Your liver, small intestine, spleen, and one kidney were severely lacerated. You had nearly bled out before your friends were able to free you and were able to transport you to medical care.”

He frowned. “When you hit, the crystal shattered, and fragments were lodged all through your abdomen. We were able to remove most of them, but six were so close to your spinal cord that we did not see a way to remove them without risking serious neurological injury. We retrieved what we could, cleaned up and closed the wound that you received when you fell.”

“Bottom line,” He shrugged, “There are several pieces of that crystal that you are going to be carrying for the rest of your life.”

My rapid recovery astounded my doctors. I seemed as if, as nice as they were, they resented it. Not only was it faster than they could account for, but I didn’t show the symptoms that they seemed to feel that I owed them. A couple of my college friends hung around for a few days, but when they saw that I was recovering okay, they wished me well and returned to their previously scheduled lives. Everybody seemed to be very happy for me.

I was not so delighted by what was happening.

I was having odd little blackouts. Such as this: I would think about reaching for my laptop and suddenly it was on my lap, powered on and logged in. It was like there were frames missing from the movie of my life. After a couple of days, I realized that I couldn’t remember plugging the laptop in to recharge, but the battery indicator always read “100%.” Or this: On my third morning I woke up to the realization that I wanted an English muffin and sausage for breakfast, not the farina that I had been fed up until then. When breakfast came and I lifted the cover, there was the muffin and sausage link. When I commented about it to the orderly, he looked at his clipboard. “You made the order last night. The nurse approved it.”

I had no memory of talking to the nurse about breakfast. I really only remembered thinking about muffin and sausage at the moment I woke. A blackout was the only thing that made sense.

At night I started to have intense, disjointed dreams. Just flashes, really, but incredibly realistic flashes of stars wheeling and swooping. I felt as though I was flying. I hadn’t had such a vivid flying dream since I was a teenager.

Once, in my flying dream, I saw the ground rush up at me and I startled awake. I lay there, my heart pounding, listening to the voices of the nurse’s shift change, feeling the strange bed beneath me, smelling the unfortunate aroma of a health-care institution, seeing the small constellation of LED lights winking in the darkness of the room. I rarely remember my dreams, but these moments of laughing joy and abject terror were imprinted on my brain permanently. I lay back and looked at the ceiling, trying to trace patterns in the holes in the acoustic tile. Gradually, my racing heart slowed and, after pounding the pillow into shape, I fell back asleep.

Within a week the doctors couldn’t justify keeping me any longer, so I was released. I asked them to let me leave the hospital by the loading dock, rather than the main entrance. I didn’t know if there were any bill collectors lurking out there, but I was in no mood to see them, or anyone, in fact. I rode a cab back to my lonely condo. I took the ficus and the violet.